Piece from the L.A. Times on Cochran's ideas about Ashkenazi intelligence.

(Psssst- Genetics.)

.... mamaleh, the Jewish position in sports is agent/manager...

Shana Tovah - Sweet New Year!

This is an accurate artistic depiction of the people defending Netflix for that movie about preteens in skimpy dancing like Hos.

https://twitter.com/ReviewsPossum/status/1304337499586691072

... mamaleh, the Jewish position in sports is agent/manager... ~ Ben David at September 11, 2020 5:44 AM

Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax might disagree with you on that.

The Jell-O man squad:

https://twitter.com/HarmlessYardDog/status/1304157858095861760

California right now:

https://mobile.twitter.com/RealAetius/status/1303898798213812224

Today's good news: Israel is normalizing relations with Bahrain.

Some travel fun with "the queen." Bow to her.

Psychotherapist or PsychoTherapist?

https://mobile.twitter.com/TheGingerarchy/status/1304237173940596742

Dark humor is a defense mechanism that helps some cope with tragedy.

https://twitter.com/Mistyears/status/1304068342869880835

Consider that most all of the big names from the Manhattan Project were Ashkenazim, including Bohm, Szilard, Bethe, Szilard, Wigner, Feynman, Teller, Ulam, and Von Neumann. And, of course, Oppenheimer.

Social science continues to demonstrate that a genetic propensity for intelligence is a critical element for a good passage through life, and some will say the critical element. You might therefore think that the outcome of World War Two, and all that's followed, was seemingly overdetermind by sheer candlepower.

I mention this to once again cite a favorite passage of non-fiction, one demonstrating poignantly that Jewish culture was as consequential:

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

David Bodanis

http://www.amazon.com/mc2-Biography-Worlds-Famous-Equation/dp/0425181642 — —

When the united States finally did get a serious atomic project started, it was helped through some skillful manipulation by impatient visitors from Britain. Mark Oliphant was another one of Rutherford's bright young men, and in the summer of 1941 he led a two-front assault. First he arrived in Washington, dangling the gift of the cavity magnetron--a key device for shrinking room-sized radar sets to a volume that could be crammed into an airplane, and also for greatly increasing accuracy. (This was when Oliphant discovered that Lyman J. Briggs, leader of the West's atomic research project, had locked the top-secret British results inside his safe.) Next, Oliphant traveled to Berkeley, where the physicist Ernest Lawrence worked.

Lawrence was not especially bright as physicists go, but he loved machines, great big powerful machines, and his very simplicity--his directness of focus-- allowed him to get them built. For example Samuel Allison (working at the University of Chicago then) remembers that Briggs had "a tiny cube of uranium which he liked to keep in his desk and show to insiders... Briggs used to say 'I want a whole pound of this,' . . . Lawrence would have said he wanted forty tons and got it."

By the summer of 1941 Briggs was out, and group of more effective leaders including Lawrence was in, and by December--when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war--the project really took off. It came to be called the Manhattan Project, as part of the cover story that it was simply part of the Manhattan Engineering District.

The refugees Briggs had scorned were indispensable. Eugene Wigner, for example, was a remarkably quiet, unassuming young Hungarian, who came from an equally quiet and unassuming family. When World War I had broken out, Eugene's father had stayed away from political discussions, pointing out, quite sensibly, the he was pretty sure the emperor was not going to be swayed by the views of the Wigner family. But this caution meant that when Eugene, a superb student, was facing university choices, the father had him take a practical engineering degree, as the odds on a career in theoretical physics succeeding were very slight.

Wigner did succeed at physics, and after he was forced out of Europe in the 1930s, he ended up centrally involved in the American duplicate of Heisenberg's calculations, detailing how a reaction could begin. But his engineering training meant that he handled the subsequent steps far better than Heisenberg. What shape, for example, should the uranium be that would go inside a reactor? The most efficient possible design would be a sphere. That way the maximum number of neutrons would be deep in the center. Next best--if a sphere was too hard to cut accurately-- would be an oval shape. After that comes a cylinder, then a cube, and last, worst of all, would be to try building it with uranium stretched out in flat sheets.

For his Leipzig device, Heisenberg had chosen the flat sheets. The reason was simply that flat surfaces almost always have the easiest properties to compute, if you're advancing by pure theory. But engineers with enough practical experience are never restricted to pure theory. There are many informal tricks of the trade for how ovals and other shapes work. Wigner knew them, as did many other similarly cautious refugees, who'd also been advised by their families to take engineering degrees. Heisenberg did not. That was of central importance. Professors in general tend to be hierarchical, and pre-World War II German professors were at the of peak such confidence. As the war went on, a number of junior researchers in Germany found that Heisenberg had been mistaken in one engineering assumption or another. But Heisenberg almost always refused to listen; would angrily try to keep them from even daring to mention it.

Even so, nobody could be confident the United States was going to to win the race to make the bomb. America was just coming out of the Great Depression; much of its industrial base was still rusted and abandoned. When Heisenberg began his research for army ordnance, the Wehrmacht was the world's most powerful fighting force. It had entire army groups supplied with equipment that surpassed that of any other nation. The United States had an army that, if you included a lot of generation-old World War I artifacts, could just about supply two divisions, thus placing it below the tenth rank in the world, at about the level of Belgium.

Germany also had the world's best engineers, and a strong university system--despite having expelled so many Jews--and above all, they had that head start; two precious years when Heisenberg and his colleagues had been working full out, while Briggs had mostly been musing at his desk. These were the quirks of fate that would influence who ended up using the equation first. E=mc2 was far from the pure reaches of Einstein's inked symbols now. The Allied effort would have to go faster.

The German effort would have to be sabotaged.

(/Clip)

Also, tangentially, Einstein.





And Zac Efron.