Correct. In 1973, things had the potential to be interesting. By 1983, not so much: mushroom clouds over Berlin, game over. Rewind to 1963, though, and Israel didn't have the infrastructure to be a significant player out-of-area.
]]>Also, is your average the median, or the mean? I could quite easily believe 4.5K as a median, because that only requires one struggler to balance a PTerry, but as a mean, it'd mean that he was outweighing scores.
Which he probably does, come to think of it.
]]>But he's undoubtedly not only the wealthiest person we have ever had visit our house, but the wealthiest who ever will.
As for Rowling, she's made some impressive donations too - £10 million for MS research a few months back.
That level of income is extremely unusual. Among our friends who are writers in this field, two live in a tiny two-up-two-down in rural Ireland, and another had to move across Ireland because she could not afford to live where she had been. In the writing field, if you can live comfortably with no other income coming in, you're a roaring success.
]]>That means that when the macguffin hits they don't get any of those convenient blackouts to confuse the issue. Chain-of-command should remain intact --- it ought to be possible for the border guards to phone Jerusalem and have it all work (assuming landlines. Satellites would, of course, be a no-go, unless there happened to be a satellite immediately above the country at the time. I wonder if this could be exploited?).
Another interesting question is --- what would happen in 1973 when a deeply confused 1940 Israel suddenly appears in a thoroughly destabilised middle east. This is, after all, the year of the Yom Kippur war with Egypt, mutual assassinations with Palestine, and the destruction of Libyan-Arab Airlines Flight 114 by Israeli fighter jets over Sinai...
]]>The Gini coefficient in this profession is 0.71. It makes your average African kleptocracy look like a communist vision of utopia.
]]>Yup.
I shall stop here, since this is off-topic for this thread.
]]>You could probably get a long way by blowing up a dam or a major military base, then finish the war with conventional troops.
(Of course, once you've worked out the tricks to refining uranium, there's really no barrier to building more and larger bombs. That's probably the point which kills the concept. A military industrial complex that knew what it was doing could turn out thousands of the things in a year)
]]>As built, it's a bloody good thing that they never got around to ramping up their reactor. It was basically an open cauldron of D2O with uranium metal chains dangling in it: a criticality accident waiting to happen.
]]>We know Heisenberg got the calculation wrong. The question of whether he did so on purpose is impossible to answer in the absence of witnesses. Doing so would have been tremendously risky during the war -- it would have been mercilessly punished as an act of sabotage -- and certainly not something to have been discussed openly at the time. Meanwhile, claims lodged after the war have to be considered as potentially self-serving.
]]>Whether anyone else could have done a better job is another question.
]]>But I digress ...
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