Nukes

Remembering Manhattan

The nuclear age began in a small laboratory underneath the football field at the University of Chicago in 1942. There, physicist Enrico Fermi conducted the world's first controlled nuclear reaction. Just three years later, World War II ended with the detonation of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The scientists of the top-secret Manhattan Project did their job terrifyingly well.

Even before the Manhattan Project, scientists knew that certain elements were unstable, slowly emitting energy as their atomic state changed over time. Some of these radioactive elements, uranium and plutonium in particular, could undergo nuclear fission. That is, the nucleus of their atoms could be split into two equal fragments, releasing large amounts of energy and a few stray neutrons, too. If these stray neutrons could strike and split other atoms, physicists figured, you could create a sustained nuclear reaction.

The problem is that it's very difficult to create just the right conditions for a sustained reaction. The solution, scientists found, is to concentrate a sufficient mass of radioactive material together, so that when one atom splits, stray neutrons stand a good chance of striking and splitting some neighbors, which then release more neutrons to continue the chaos. The mass necessary to achieve this chain reaction is known as "critical mass."

Yet it's not enough to have a critical mass of uranium or plutonium. You need the right kind of uranium or plutonium, as each exists in several different isotopes. Isotopes of an element may have the same chemical properties, but because they have different numbers of neutrons in their nucleus, they have different radioactive properties.

Only uranium-235 and plutonium-239 have the right nuclear stuff for sustainable fission. You can mine uranium ore out of the earth, but almost all of the ore is uranium-238, and you'll need to mine huge amounts to extract even a little U-235. The right plutonium is even harder to get, because it doesn't exist in the earth at all. It has to be produced in sophisticated nuclear reactors. Only after these difficult and expensive processes will you have the purified "weapons-grade" material needed for a nuclear weapon.

The thermonuclear weapons in modern arsenals are even more complex--not to mention a thousand times more powerful than the bomb exploded over Hiroshima. First detonated in 1952, thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bombs use the intense heat of a fission reaction to start a second, fusion reaction, in which hydrogen isotopes combine to form helium. To fit together, the hydrogen atoms must lose mass. The mass becomes energy, and kilotons of destructive force become megatons.

Nightmare Scenario

A 10-megaton nuclear weapon (current U.S. warhead strength) creates an explosion equivalent to the detonation of 10 million tons of TNT. That's 10 million tons versus less than 200 pounds of nuclear fuel. Half of the energy released by a nuclear explosion is in the blast itself. Pressure waves emanating from a 10-megaton blast would exceed 30 pounds per square inch and generate winds in excess of 700 miles per hour. Such winds could knock down steel-and-concrete buildings with ease. Even 20 miles away, the blast would shatter windows and uproot trees.

Temperatures around ground zero would rise to more than 20 million degrees Fahrenheit--hotter than the sun. Everything in a 2-mile radius would be vaporized. Ten miles out, materials like glass and steel would melt. At 15 miles, temperatures would reach 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, igniting all combustible materials and producing innumerable fires. Even at distances greater than 20 miles, humans would suffer serious burns in the intense heat.

Still, despite the massive damage it can cause, the explosion itself is for many the least worrisome aspect of nuclear weapons. When the smoke clears and the fires are out, the bomb's most insidious effect remains: radiation.

Radiation is all around you. It bombards you every moment of your life, everywhere you go. Don't panic, though--radiation is simply traveling energy, and most of it is harmless. Only some forms, like ultraviolet light and X-rays, are harmful if you're exposed too long. Radiation like this, called ionizing radiation, contains enough energy to break down chemical bonds in substances that absorb it.

Radioactive elements like uranium and plutonium emit, among other things, gamma rays, packing 10,000 times more energy than visible light. Gamma rays can pass right through humans. Only dense materials like lead can block them. Because gamma radiation can penetrate human tissue, even external exposure is harmful, causing the ionization of atoms in your body. This leads to massive cellular damage, resulting in system-wide "radiation sickness" and, with enough exposure, death.

Although damage from the blast, heat, and even external radiation burns may heal over time, the ionizing damage done to the DNA in human cells will remain. Sooner or later, the body's own replication of damaged DNA leads to the final danger of a nuclear blast: cancer, mutation, and genetic abnormalities. The final fatalities can take years--even decades--to occur.

Christopher Call
February 14, 2005

From: KnowledgeNews

News from Mesopotamia

Mesopotamian headlines?

Today's Iraq never fails to make headlines. There was a time when Iraq made history, not news--when Mesopotamia actually helped get civilization on its feet. Today, let's take the long view and look at the "old news."

Toddling through Mesopotamia

Some people say Iraq is democracy's greatest test. Others say it's a violent mess. But a historian will say Iraq's the cradle of civilization.

It's true. Ancient Iraq--Mesopotamia--was likely home to the first agriculture, the first cities, the first laws. It was home to the first wheel and the first writing, too. It was where humans grew out of cultural diapers and into toddler training pants. Here's the story, step by toddler step.

Solid Food --
Agriculture

The days of "cavemen" hunting mammoths in the snow really weren't that long ago. The last Ice Age didn't end until around 10,000 BC, and mammoth meatloaf stayed on man's menu for centuries after that. Lunch came largely where you found it--find a berry, eat a berry. Archaeological evidence suggests that a few crafty cowboys (or bad hunters) domesticated cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats and started tending to their food. But nobody grew crops.

People gathered wild grains where they could, of course. Eventually, someone was bound to notice that a few scattered grains of wheat or barley had sprouted beside the grinding place. Archaeologists think this "a-ha!"--perhaps the most important "a-ha!" in human history--happened around 8000 BC, with the first farmers donning seed-corn caps in the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They've identified other contenders for the "first farmer" title, too, in Asia and the Americas. One thing is for sure. With a surplus of food like never before, the people of Mesopotamia (Greek for "land between the rivers") flourished.

Getting Wet and Keeping Dry --
Villages & Cities

As long as lunch was on the hoof, nobody had much incentive to stay in one place. Farming, for the first time, gave people roots, and semi-permanent villages sprang up with the crops. Still, successive plantings sucked the life out of the soil, and people eventually had to pick up and move to a new garden spot. The farmers of Mesopotamia had an advantage here: river water, and plenty of it, fed the alluvial land. The trick was controlling it, both to water the crops and to keep it from flooding the village. So people learned the art of irrigation, dikes, and dams. Add in crop rotation, and you've got villages built to last throughout Mesopotamia.

You've got one more thing, too: government. Maintaining complex irrigation and flood control systems took organization and specialization. You grow the food, and I'll dig the ditches. And Uncle Gilgamesh will collect the taxes to pay my salary and maintain the public works. By 3500 BC, the world's first city-dwellers lived in Mesopotamian burgs where thousands of people did dozens of different jobs--and where anyone would have recognized the old joke about death and taxes.

Circle Time --
The Wheel

Fred Flintstone aside, the wheel was not a Stone Age tool. As Mesopotamian villages gradually morphed into cities between 5000 and 3500 BC, the people closest to the Persian Gulf, called the Sumerians, achieved particular prominence. By 3500 BC, some Sumerian Sam (or Samantha) had figured out how to make a wheel. A Sumerian pictograph from around 3500 BC actually features the wheel in an infomercial-style before-and-after shot, showing a wooden sled side-by-side with a virtually identical wheeled "sled."

Inspiration seems to have come from the potter's wheel, which appeared in Mesopotamia around the same time. All early models of the wheel consisted of three planks of wood clamped together with two crosspieces and carved to roundness. By 2000 BC, deluxe models had spokes. Oxen were sold separately.

One-Two-Three, ABC --
Cuneiform

Around the time the wheel became something to write home about, Sumerians learned how to write home. Thank the accountants, not the English majors. City life had gotten complicated, and merchants and tax collectors could no longer just remember who paid how much for what. So they started keeping simple accounts--tallies and tokens designed more to jog the memory than anything else. Soon, would-be writers started using pictographs to represent objects, and the pictographs, in turn, evolved into linear marks denoting not only objects but the sounds of spoken syllables as well.

Scholars today call the Sumerian symbols cuneiform--from the Latin cuneus, or wedge--because scribes made wedge-shaped characters by pressing the slanted end of a reed stylus into wet clay. When finished, they fired the clay to harden it. Thousands of these clay tablets survive today. The earliest tablets simply list commodities in various amounts next to people's names.

Playing Nice with Others --
The Law

By 2100 BC, people were writing more than receipts. They were recording the law, allowing legal precedent to pass more easily from one generation to the next. Tribal rules surely existed for thousands of years. But the communal complexity of city life expanded both the need for rules and the number of situations calling for a rule in the first place. The law simply outgrew oral pronouncements.

The first known legal code comes from the Sumerian king Ur-Nammu, who founded a dynasty at the city of Ur in 2112 BC. The most famous comes from Hammurabi, who started his rule in Babylon in 1792 BC, after the Sumerians gave way to the Akkadians upriver. Hammurabi didn't look kindly on criminals. Bad guys were as likely to die as face a fine. But he did apparently try hard for social justice. Those captured in the king's wars were guaranteed ransom, farmers hurt by drought or flood could ignore their debts, and wives abandoned by husbands got alimony and child support. True to writing's original purpose, many of the laws regulated commerce. Rule #105: Always get a receipt!

Michael Himick
June 8, 2005

From: KnowledgeNews

Most idiotic crimes of the 20th century

1901. A thief robbed a post train in New Orleans and stole 12,568
Christmas cards.

1910. A man known as John Smith decided to rob a bank. He put on
women's tights and entered the office. All clients and the security
started laughing, but it did not stop Smith from approaching the cash
desk and withdrawing $10,000 from his own account. Laughing police
officers took the bizarre thief away.

1936. A prisoner sentenced to death penalty escaped during his own
execution. He ran away together with the electric chair, to which he
was fixed. The prisoner hoped to cross the Mexican border and sell
the electric chair in Mexico. The police nabbed the fugitive near the
prison gate.

1966. A group of gypsies stole an elephant in the city of
Arkhangelsk, Russia. They failed to sell the animal and had to bring
it back to the zoo.

1975. A married couple of thieves went to court when they could not
agree on how to split what they had stolen before. The court put them
both in jail.

1980. Two perpetrators tried to rob a bank in New York. They disarmed
the security, told them to take all money and other metal things out
of their pockets and stole all that. No one even bothered to catch
them.

1982. A criminal broke into a flat of a Russian elderly lady and
stole a replica of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The lady cut that picture
out from a very old magazine - it was the only thing that the
criminal stole.

1986. A thief broke into a casino in Atlantic City. Yielding a gun,
the man stole a bag of quarters. The thief ran about ten meters away
from the cash desk, sat down at one of the gambling machines and
started playing. Hardly had he lost a half of the money to the
machine, when the police nabbed him.

1998. The largest theft of punched cards took place in the Moscow
region in 1998. Three years later it became known that someone had
stolen about 20 train cars of punched cards. It is still a mystery
who stole the cards, what for and where such a large number of cards
came from. Furthermore, no one even reported the disappearance of 20
cars.

1999. A group of Russian soldiers robbed a beer kiosk not far from
their quarters. A company of soldiers stopped near the kiosk, a
sergeant called three military men from the line and ordered them to
rob it.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah

(Redirected from Muhammad Ali Jinnah) Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah(bhai) Poonjah (referred to in Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam, or "Great Leader", which is a legally defined title) (December 25, 1876 - September 11, 1948) was an Indian Muslim nationalist, who led the movement demanding a separate homeland for Muslims in South Asia and served as Pakistan's first Governor-General. Contents [showhide] 1 Early Life and Family History 2 Law 3 Political Career 4 Quotes 5 Trivia 6 References [edit] Early Life and Family History Jinnah's birthplace and date of birth are disputed; however, it is generally believed that he was born in Wazir Mansion, Karachi, and raised in Bombay. His father was Jinnahbhai Poonja, from Gujarat (the younger Jinnah dropped 'bhai' from his name, in 1894). Jinnah's father lived from 1857-1901. Jinnah's family had Hindu, Ismaili, Shia and Sunni ancestry; and the family was primarily Ismaili. Jinnah was educated at the Sind Madrasatul Islam and the Christian Society High School, in Karachi. In 1893, he went to London to work for Graham's Shipping and Trading Company, which his father did business with. He had been married to a 16-year old (distant) relative named Emibai; but, she died shortly after he moved to London. Around this time, his mother died as well. In 1918 he would marry Rattanbai Petit and they had a daughter, Dina. In 1929, his second wife died. He had one sister, Fatima Jinnah. [edit] Law A young Jinnah as a law student In 1894, Jinnah quit his job in order to study law at Lincoln's Inn; from which he became the youngest Indian to graduate (1896). It is believed that Jinnah decided to study there as he was impressed by a mural in the main dining hall (1--Ahmed); one which depicted Moses and Muhammed. Jinnah would briefly work with MP Dadabhai Naoroji. By the end of 1896, Jinnah was a member of the Indian National Congress and practicing law with the Bombay bar (as the only Muslim barrister). There he earned a reputation regarding his lack of respect for the British Empire. In one incident, a judge kept interrupting Jinnah by saying, "Rubbish!" Jinnah eventually responded by saying, "Your honour, nothing but rubbish has passed your mouth all morning." Shortly after this incident, in 1901, Sir Charles Ollivant offered to hire Jinnah at 1,500 rupees per month. Jinnah refused, believing he could earn that much on a daily basis. (By the early 1930s, Jinnah was earning about 40,000 rupees a month.) In 1906, Jinnah served as secretary to Naoroji, who was then serving as president of the National Congress. In 1906, Bal Gangadhar Tilak would ask Jinnah to represent him, during his trial for sedition. Jinnah as a young man [edit] Political Career Jinnah with Gandhi On January 25, 1910, Jinnah became the "Muslim member from Bombay" on the 60-man Legislative Council of India. In 1913, Jinnah joined the Muslim League and, in 1914, would support Indian participation in World War I. In 1916, Jinnah became the president of the Lucknow Muslim League session and again in 1920; and later, from 1920-30 and from 1937-47, would serve as the League's president. Jinnah was initially hailed as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity but later events forced him to change his stance. He disagreed with Mohandas Gandhi over the policy of noncooperation and later over the proposal that Hindu and Muslim communities hold separate elections in any future state. By 1921, Jinnah had resigned from the Indian National Congress and voiced his support for separate Muslim negotiations with Britain over the future of India. Jinnah participated in the Round Table Conference (1930-1931) but was frustrated at the failure to achieve any tangible results; he announced his retirement from politics. By then, however, he was a leader of the local Muslim population, and despite his ostensible retirement, he was voted as President for Life of the League in 1934. Adopting what some have interpreted as a "divide and conquer" policy, the British initially supported Jinnah, hoping that he would be a powerful counterbalance to the Hindu nationalist movement. Jinnah was more amenable to British interests: he supported Indian participation in World War II while the Indian National Congress opposed the war. Jinnah first raised the issue of partition at the Lahore Conference (1940). He was the first to declare that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct peoples, adding that if partition was not achieved the subcontinent would erupt in civil war. On July 26, 1943, a member of the Khaksars attempted to assassinate Jinnah by stabbing; Jinnah was wounded. Though the notion of partition was originally rejected by the British, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten eventually came round to accepting the idea. The idea was formally accepted on June 3, 1947, and one month later, on August 14, the Dominion of Pakistan was created. Jinnah was the new nation's first Governor-General and president of its legislative assembly. He gave a clear vision for a modern democratic Islamic state. Sadly that vision was never followed. An ailing Jinnah Despite partition, the Subcontinent was engulfed in war. Overworked from dealing with the fighting and a growing refugee crisis, Jinnah was unable to play a significant role in strengthening the new nation-state. He died on September 11, 1948, from tuberculosis. A mausoleum was built to honour Jinnah in Karachi. Quotes Stanley Wolpert on Jinnah -- "Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three." Mohammad Ali Jinnah 1942 -- "I have lived as plain Mr. Jinnah and I hope to die as plain Mr. Jinnah. I am very much averse to any title or honours and I will be more than happy if there was no prefix to my name." "We have to hope for the best, but be ready for the worst."