"O, 'tis me, not my sentence they'll suspend. / Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too"

[larryhammer]

I am pretty sure that a sufficiently clever someone could find the thematic thread connecting these three links, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to manage even minimally clever. Feel free to take a whack at it yourselves:

From Why did Japan surrender?:

To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders, Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way. If they didn’t surrender after [the firebombing of] Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.

tl,dr: There's good arguments that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, cutting off the possibility of mediation by Moscow, that provoked capitulation. This is an important question as it implies nuclear weapons might not be as strong a deterrent as we assume. (via lost)

Pangea marked with today's countries. (via)

From this piece on the man, I come to this work in words of one beat, though the name is all bad words: Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained. I am in awe.

---L.

Subject quote from "Billy in the Darbies," Herman Melville.