Hiroshima (広島)

This letter from Einstein to Roosevelt is kept at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.  (See here for transcript.) Dated 2nd August 1939, it outlines the feasibility of both nuclear power and nuclear weaponry, and points to the evidence that the Germans were also investigating these. (It turns out the Japanese were too.)


6 years and 4 days later Little Boy was dropped, killing around 80,000 on the first day. One of the survivors, Sadako Sasaki (佐々木 禎子), just two years old at the time, feel ill with leukaemia years later. A saying went that if you folded 1000 paper cranes you would be granted a wish, so she started making paper cranes furiously and reached 1300 cranes, but died anyway in 1955. Today, schoolchildren from around the world send paper cranes to the peace park in tribute. The picture below is a photograph of her memorial in the Hiroshima peace park


The final death toll was at least 140,000.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Make ASCII Diagrams Beautifuller

Image
I've discovered an excellent tool in asciiflow.com .  The website makes it really easy to create ASCII box diagrams like this They put these things in fruit machines you know! This is ideal for source code banners, which I think should contain helpful documentation - but most programmers think it's a good place for the COPYRIGHT information and nothing else. But wait! we can make it beautifuller... and easier to read... by replacing some of the ASCII characters with ones available in UTF-8: There!  Isn't that better?  (Although some purists may object to non-ASCII characters in your code base.) SOURCE CODE: #!/usr/bin/python2 # coding: utf-8 # + gets converted in different ways depending on it's 4 neighbours # # . N . { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 3 set if N in "+|<>" # W + E { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 2 set if S in "+|<>" # . S . { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 1 set if W in "+-^v" # { nsew(N,S,E,W) has bit 0 set if E in
Read more

Calculation of ECS using simple convection model

Image
Contents Intro Simple stratified model Alternative convection model Tropospheric temperature gradient Approach used in convection model Calculation of Radiative Forcing from CO₂ increase Calculation of Radiative Forcing from H₂O increase Calculation of zero-feedback ECS Effect of including feedbacks Effect of water vapour Effect of cloud cover change Effect of sea ice loss Calculation of ECS including feedbacks Limitations One more thing: Changes to Troposphere depth Intro The goal of this post is to see if we can come up with an estimate of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity using a simple model in which the atmosphere is treated as well-mixed.  By "simple" I mean that using the model will not require any advanced mathematics or computation, but will still be realistic enough to come up with an estimate within the likely range of 2.5 - 4.0°C predicted by the IPCC Assessment Report 6 .  I will try to take as little on trust as possible and show how the results are arrived at.
Read more

Why growth is falling in all developed countries (as a long term trend)

Image
In this post I argue that economic growth is not the normal state of affairs, it is a blip caused by the discovery of a one-off resource of non-renewable energy.   The logistic equation $$ \frac{dy}{dt} = y(1-y) $$ Here's a simple model.  Humans discover an exploitable but limited resource and start consuming it.  The amount consumed, $y(t)$, is a function of time.  The general form of the equation is $\frac{dy}{dt} = \alpha y (\beta - y)$, but if you choose the right units $\alpha$ and $\beta$ both become $1$. Why should this work, in principle? Early on, the factor $1-y$ is approximately $1$ and can be ignored.  So the model states that annual consumption $dy/dt$ starts off proportional to $y$.  In other words, $y$ grows exponentially at first.  This could happen if exploiting the resource enables further exploitation of the resource.  For example, suppose a few humans are shipwrecked on an island with 1000 trees: they take ages to cut down the first tree as they are using their
Read more