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Thus America, hitherto rendered ineffectual by its remoteness, its racial diversity and its pusillanimous leadership, found itself instantly united, angry and committed to wage total war with all its outraged strength. Hitler’s reckless declaration the following week drew a full measure of this enormous fury down upon his own nation.
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
What if you want the payouts to continue “forever,” as you might for an endowment? Computer simulations showed me that with the best long-term investments, such as stocks and commercial real estate, annual future spending should be limited to the inflation-adjusted level of 2 percent of the original gift. This surprisingly conservative figure assumes that future investment results will be similar in risk and return to US historical experience. In that case, the chance that the endowment is never exhausted turns out to be 96 percent. The 2 percent spending limit is so low because, if the fund is sharply reduced in its early years by a severe market decline, a higher spending requirement might wipe it out.
A Man for All Markets
Edward O. Thorp
only person who believed that something really bad might happen was Jack Hyde, a geology professor at a community college in Tacoma. He pointed out that St. Helens didn't have an open vent, as Hawaiian volcanoes have, so any pressure building up inside was bound to be released dramatically and probably catastrophically. However, Hyde was not part of the official team and his observations attracted little notice. We all know what happened next. At 8:32 A.M. on a Sunday morning, May 18, the north side of the volcano collapsed, sending an enormous avalanche of dirt and rock rushing down the mountain slope at 150 miles an hour. It was the biggest landslide in human history and carried enough material to bury the whole of Manhattan to a depth of four hundred feet. A minute later, its flank severely weakened, St. Helens exploded with the force of five hundred Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, shooting out a murderous hot cloud at up to 650 miles an hour—much too fast, clearly, for anyone nearby to outrace. Many people who were thought to be in safe areas, often far out of sight of the volcano, were overtaken. Fifty-seven people were killed. Twenty-three of the bodies were never found.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
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