re: #47 William Lewis

I had a high school history teacher that was. Instead, an idiot. Things like getting the date of President Kennedy’s assassination wrong ( confused it with his brother’s) and wouldn’t admit the error. I stopped attending class and finally the guidance counselor arranged for me to a paper in place of the attendance. I did a long paper on the design and construction of nuclear weapons equivalent to Fat Man and Little Boy using open sources. I didn’t do too bad - got an A from the idiot and when I recently found a copy and double checked my work (lots more open now than in 1980) I found the gun type Uranium bomb would have fizzled but the implosion bomb was correct and probably would have had a higher yield than I’d originally guessed. Looking at the North Korean test results makes me wonder WTF they are really doing since they are the only ones, ever, to fail like that.

Maybe North Korea used your paper?

My wife also did a paper on nuclear weapons in seventh grade (1975) based on information in the school and St. Louis libraries. She got an A on her paper, on how both Little Boy and Fat Man operated. She had a classmate that did a paper on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (the kid scored an interview with the head of the Fed branch there).

My wife went to a cooler school than I did (a school for gifted students - it required being in the 99th percentile based on standardised IQ tests). She had more people in one classroom than I had in my whole graduating class.