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Because we can't see into the Earth, we have to use other techniques, which mostly involve reading waves as they travel through the interior. We also know a little bit about the mantle from what are known as kimberlite pipes, where diamonds are formed. What happens is that deep in the Earth there is an explosion that fires, in effect, a cannonball of magma to the surface at supersonic speeds. It is a totally random event. A kimberlite pipe could explode in your backyard as you read this. Because they come up from such depths—up to 120 miles down—kimberlite pipes bring up all kinds of things not normally found on or near the surface: a rock called peridotite, crystals of olivine, and—just occasionally, in about one pipe in a hundred—diamonds. Lots of carbon comes up with kimberlite ejecta, but most is vaporized or turns to graphite. Only occasionally does a hunk of it shoot up at just the right speed and cool down with the necessary swiftness to become a diamond. It was such a pipe that made Johannesburg the most productive diamond mining city in the world, but there may be others even bigger that we don't know about. Geologists know that somewhere in the vicinity of northeastern Indiana there is evidence of a pipe or group of pipes that may be truly colossal.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Amos found that notion absurd. The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool. “The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,” he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. “It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.” The mind, when it dealt with uncertain situations, was like a Swiss Army knife. It was a good enough tool for most jobs required of it, but not exactly suited to anything—and certainly not fully “evolved.” “Listen to evolutionary psychologists long enough,” Amos said, “and you’ll stop believing in evolution.”
The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
The fear of another war had infected Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay. Certainly Roosevelt’s Washington was not without its defeatists; in the last fiscal year the Army’s plans for new equipment had been limited to 1,870 more Garand rifles. Perhaps the generals were only being realistic; they would have had a difficult time getting much more on the Hill. But Roosevelt saw an alternative. The most resolute hard-core isolationist, believing only in Fortress America, conceded the need for a strong Navy. Therefore the President rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on January 28, 1938, and asked for a billion-dollar “two-ocean” Navy. He got it, in the Vinson Naval Act. At the same time he sent Hopkins to the Pacific Coast for a survey; he wanted to know how quickly aircraft factories could convert to the production of warplanes. As Hopkins later noted, the President felt certain that war was coming to America “and he believed that air power would win it.” His statement in 1938 that the United States needed 8,000 planes distressed almost everyone, including generals and admirals. An exception was Air Corps General Arnold. Briefing the commander in chief, Arnold had estimated that Germany then had 8,000 bombers and fighters. America had 1,650 pilots, a few hundred obsolete planes, and thirteen B-17s on order, to be delivered at the end of 1938. The general added pointedly that the lead time for modern weapons was very long. Roosevelt gave him the green light for expansion. Without that sanction, Arnold declared after the war, the sky over Normandy could not have been cleared of the Luftwaffe in 1944, and D-Day could not have been scheduled for June 6.
The Glory and the Dream
William Manchester
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