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Historical evidence supports Gorbachev’s accusations, however defensive Americans may feel about them. Gorbachev ignores at least two important facts, however: that the Soviet Union was demonstrating open and covert aggression in Eastern Europe and that its opacity as a closed society made a realistic assessment of its intentions difficult. From a longer perspective, the arms race was a process of communication and of learning, paced as all progress is paced by the limitations of human intellect. The discovery in 1938 of how to release nuclear energy introduced a singularity into the human world—a deep new reality, a region where the old rules of war no longer applied. The region of nuclear singularity enlarged across the decades, sweeping war away at its shock front until today it excludes all but civil wars and limited conventional wars.
The explosion had left a crater more than forty miles across—much too huge to be perceived from anywhere at ground level. At some time in the past Yellowstone must have blown up with a violence far beyond the scale of anything known to humans. Yellowstone, it turns out, is a supervolcano. It sits on top of an enormous hot spot, a reservoir of molten rock that rises from at least 125 miles down in the Earth. The heat from the hot spot is what powers all of Yellowstone's vents, geysers, hot springs, and popping mud pots. Beneath the surface is a magma chamber that is about forty-five miles across—roughly the same dimensions as the park—and about eight miles thick at its thickest point. Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, and you have some idea of what visitors to Yellowstone are shuffling around on top of. The pressure that such a pool of magma exerts on the crust above has lifted Yellowstone and about three hundred miles of surrounding territory about 1,700 feet higher than they would otherwise be. If it blew, the cataclysm is pretty well beyond imagining.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Most people tend to think of interruptions as originating from another person or from our devices, such as through a notification. But in our studies of people in their natural work environments, we observed a strange and regular phenomenon which typically looked like this: a person would be working on a task on their computer. Then, for no apparent reason to the observer, this person suddenly stopped what they were doing and checked their email or picked up their phone. There was no discernible stimulus that caused the person to interrupt themselves—there was rather some internal trigger, perhaps a thought, a memory, or habit. These interruptions originate from within ourselves. One of the most surprising results in our research is that we find that people are nearly as likely to self-interrupt due to something internal in them as to be interrupted by something external to them.10 We may not even be aware of how often we self-interrupt.
Attention Span
Gloria Mark
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