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Pratt knew better, as shown by his testimony before the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement (NCFIRRE 1993c, 12). Under GAAP, as they were applied in the early 1980s, two institutions with massive negative earnings could merge, and the combined entity could show positive income without the operations of either institution changing (NCFIRRE 1993a, 38).
The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One
William K. Black
Danny was like a kid with the world’s best toy closet who is so paralyzed by indecision that he never gets around to enjoying his possessions but instead just stands there worrying himself to death over whether to grab his Super Soaker or take his electric scooter out for a spin. Amos rooted around in Danny’s mind and said, “Screw it, we’re going to play with all of this stuff.” There would be times, later in their relationship, when Danny would go into a deep funk—a depression, almost—and walk around saying, “I’m out of ideas.” Even that Amos found funny. Their mutual friend Avishai Margalit recalled, “When he heard that Danny was saying, ‘I’m finished, I’m out of ideas,’ Amos laughed and said, ‘Danny has more ideas in one minute than a hundred people have in a hundred years.’”
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
Then a member of the newly arrived British mission made a proposal that paid his mission’s way. James L. Tuck was a tall, rumpled Cherwell protégé from Oxford who had worked in England developing shaped charges for armor-piercing shells. A shaped charge is a charge of high explosive arranged in such a way—usually hollowed out like an empty ice cream cone with the open end pointed forward—that its normally divergent, bubble-shaped shock wave converges into a high-speed jet. Such a ferocious jet can punch its way through the thick armor of a tank to spray death inside. It had just become clear from theoretical work that the several diverging shock waves produced by multiple detonators in Neddermeyer’s experiments reinforced each other where they collided and produced points of high pressure; such pressure nodes in turn caused the jets and irregularities that spoiled the implosion. Rather than continue trying to smooth out a colliding collection of divergent shock waves, Tuck sensibly proposed that the laboratory consider designing an arrangement of explosives that would produce a converging wave to begin with, fitting the shock wave to the shape it needed to squeeze. Such explosive arrangements were called lenses by analogy with optical lenses that similarly focus light. No one wanted to tackle anything so complex so late in the war. Geoffrey Taylor, the British hydrodynamicist, arrived in May to offer further insight into the problem. He had developed an understanding of what came to be called Raleigh-Taylor instabilities, instabilities formed at the boundaries between materials. Accelerate heavy material against light material, he demonstrated mathematically, and the boundary between the two will be stable. But accelerate light material against heavy material and the boundary between the two will be unstable and turbulent, causing the two materials to mix in ways extremely difficult to predict. High explosive was light compared to tamper. All of the tamper materials under consideration except uranium were significantly lighter than plutonium.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
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