Official "This Day In History" thread

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Legally we can't try, but we are interested

Ditto.

It might, or might not, be the case that I've tried other substances.

What I can say is that nicotine does almost nothing for me, that caffeine gives an interesting high but only in doses which are probably harmful. Ethanol is addictive but interesting and worth experiencing IMO.

Capsaicin is not addictive, though undoubtedly habit-forming, and generates a powerful endorphin high in me. The only deleterious side-effect, AFAICT, is that prolonged (many years) high doses can damage the digestive tract and lead to ulcers. That said, it is also a powerful vermifuge --- which could prove valuable in some circumstances.

I know that I've already posted my chilli con coction recipe in the relevant thread but can't now remember (amnesia is a common side-effect of the over usse of ethanol) whether spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino has been given the equivalent treatment.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Martin Luther King's traffic ticket changed history's course

DECATUR, Ga. (AP) — On this day 60 years ago, a black man driving a white woman was pulled over in a traffic stop that would change the course of American history.

The incident was unknown to most at the time and has been largely forgotten. The man was Martin Luther King Jr., and his citation on May 4, 1960, led to him being sentenced, illegally, to a chain gang.
<snip>
The AP reported on Oct. 25, 1960, that over 300 people crowded into the Decatur courtroom to watch Judge J. Oscar Mitchell sentence King to four months, even though King's Alabama license was valid until 1962.

"I watched in horror as Martin was immediately taken from the courtroom, his hands in metal cuffs behind his back," Coretta Scott King recalled in her autobiography. "Martin later told me that the terrors of southern justice, wherein scores of black men were plucked from their cells and never seen again, ran through his mind."

King urged his wife to be strong in a letter from a Georgia prison. Three years before "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," he wrote: "this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people."

With days left in the race, the campaigns of Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy sought to downplay civil rights issues for fear of losing southern white votes.

Blacks had mostly voted Republican, since Abraham Lincoln. Nixon had just been endorsed by Martin Luther King Sr., the leader of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

But Nixon ignored their pleas for help, while Kennedy called Coretta to express his sympathy.

Historians Taylor Branch and David Garrow wrote that Robert F. Kennedy threw a fit, telling aides who fed her number to his brother that they cost him the presidency, but he called Mitchell, who reversed his denial of bond, immediately freeing King.

King's father switched his endorsement, saying Kennedy had "the moral courage to stand up for what's right." That quote, and others, appeared in a blue-papered pamphlet titled "No Comment Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy." Unnoticed by the national media, Kennedy aides and King supporters distributed the pamphlet in black churches around the nation the Sunday before Election Day.

Blacks had voted 60-40 Republican just four years earlier; this time they voted 70-30 for the Democrat, providing more than enough for Kennedy to win the electoral college and the popular vote by a narrow 113,000 margin nationwide, according to Theodore H. White in "The Making of the Presidency 1960."
<snip>

[ewmayer]

May 4, 2020 is also 50th anniversary of US National Guard troops shooting and killing 4 student Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, a little over 2 years after MLK was assassinated.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

May 4, 2020 is also 50th anniversary of US National Guard troops shooting and killing 4 student Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, a little over 2 years after MLK was assassinated.

Kent State Shootings: A Lot of People Were Crying, and the Guard Walked Away
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture...4-1970-992983/

Devo’s Jerry Casale Looks Back at Kent State 50 Years Later: ‘Time Stood Still’
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...rotest-992651/

[Nick]

75 years ago today, the Netherlands was liberated from Nazi occupation.
It's also going to be the strangest Liberation Day celebration in all that time
because of the current corona virus restrictions.

[Xyzzy]

Hiroshima bomb: Japan marks 75 years since nuclear attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53660059

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Hiroshima bomb: Japan marks 75 years since nuclear attack

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53660059

Being a numbers & physics nerd, I can't resist: It's an interesting exercise to work backward from the estimated explosive yield and calculate just what % of the Hiroshima bomb's crude gun-type supercriticality design's incredibly-expensive-to-obtain U235 fissioned , and to compare that "explosive efficiency" to that of the Nagasaki Pu-implosion bomb a few days later. (Yah, you can find it on Wikipedia, but where's the fun?)

[tServo]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Being a numbers & physics nerd, I can't resist: It's an interesting exercise to work backward from the estimated explosive yield and calculate just what % of the Hiroshima bomb's crude gun-type supercriticality design's incredibly-expensive-to-obtain U235 fissioned , and to compare that "explosive efficiency" to that of the Nagasaki Pu-implosion bomb a few days later. (Yah, you can find it on Wikipedia, but where's the fun?)

I read this amazing stat in the excellent Richard Rhodes book:
The first orientation meeting for newly arrived scientists at Los Alamos was held April, 1943.
A mere 27 months later was the Trinity test !!!!
One must also remember that the original design for the plutonium bomb was abandoned and they had to start over.

[Xyzzy]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

…incredibly-expensive-to-obtain U235…

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...he-atomic-bomb

[Till]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...he-atomic-bomb

Fascinating article!

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...he-atomic-bomb

Yes, Shinkolobwe, what an amazing concentration of Uranium - better ores there 65% pure U, and even the "tailings" are 20% U! The concentration was such that parts of the mine acted as natural nuclear reactors in the geologic past.

In a deal with Union Minière – negotiated by the British, who owned a 30% interest in the company – the US secured 1,200 tonnes of Congolese uranium, which was stockpiled on Staten Island, US, and an additional 3,000 tonnes that was stored above ground at the mine in Shinkolobwe. But it was not enough. US Army engineers were dispatched to drain the mine, which had fallen into disuse, and bring it back into production.

"It was not enough" - only in the context of insisting on a crude "safe design" using U235 slugs, as ended up being used just once due to its extreme inefficiency, at Hiroshima. If they hadn't been able to secure the above naturally-high-enriched stockpile, they would've simply been forced to make the Pu-implosion bomb the main line or research - a much smaller amount of modest (20% or less) enriched U in a reactor yields Pu, which - unlike the expensive isotopic U235/U238 separation - can be *chemically* separated from the burned enriched-U slugs. But given the big Shinkolobwe haul they had the luxury of a dual-track, and once they'd spent all that time and money building the cruder gun-type weapon, might as well use it, right? After the twin bombings, the remaining U235 was repurposed into implosion bomb cores.

Also, the article makes it sound like Einstein discovered the potential of Uranium:

It was only when nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 that the potential of uranium became apparent. After hearing about the discovery, Albert Einstein immediately wrote to US president Franklin D Roosevelt, advising him that the element could be used to generate a colossal amount of energy – even to construct powerful bombs.

I hate such later hagiography where the role of the actual other 'lesser' scientists who made the discoveries get written out in favor of the Big Names. In this case, Joliot-Curie, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, who approached the by-then-elder-statesman Einstein because they figured someone of his stature would be more likely to catch the president's ear. From the actual letter:

Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations.

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America--that it may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future...

But fascinating colonial-exploitation and cold war history, in any event.