Of Hearts and Penicillin

mike — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:50:17 +0000

As I’m often wont to do, I checked out This Day in History on the History Channel web site. Besides being the day associated with romance, today is also the day that penicillin was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming.

Coincidence? Hmmm. How much penicillin has been consumed as a result of "love"?

Interestingly, the History Channel lists today as the day of discovery of penicillin, yet Wikipedia lists September 28, 1928 as the date of discovery.

Nuclear Peace

mike — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 03:34:53 +0000

I’m an avid watcher of the History Channel. On a recent show about the Manhattan Project, the claim was made that the world’s death rate from war dropped dramatically with the creation of nuclear weapons. Before then, the rate had been on a continuous (and even exponential in the 20th century) rise throughout history. But that with the advent of nuclear weapons the war death rate dropped dramatically and has stayed at a (relatively) low level ever since. The unstated conclusion being that the threat of nuclear weapons has imposed some type of restraint on humankind’s propensity for war making.

How interesting! As someone who grew up during the nuclear age with the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction preventing the US and Russia from engaging in major military conflict, I had never thought of the Bomb as a lifesaving device. Nuclear arsenals as a boon to mankind. What a concept! Our doom as our salvation.

Legend has it that J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project, guessed this effect and named the first atomic test Trinity after being moved by the poetry of John Donne.

If you’re interested, a quick trip to Google revealed this paper by Alex Roland, a professor at Duke University, in which he discusses the relationship between technology and war. His paper provides some of the statistics supporting the death rate argument.

Random Stew » History Channel

Of Hearts and Penicillin

Nuclear Peace