Ideas That Don’t Quite Work

One of the things I love about science is that it proceeds not just by learning what is true, or what works – but by learning what is not true or what does not work. Naturally, we’d all rather make great leaps of understanding, but sometimes we can learn a bit, and push things in a good direction if we can handle a bit of failure.

Today, I advanced the art of blade-smithing a tiny bit by discovering another thing that does not quite work.

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The NPT

The US talks a lot about non-proliferation, and regularly joins with the world community to levy sanctions on nations that are not complying with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran and North Korea being prime examples of countries that have had a great deal of pressure (in the case of North Korea, the population has been starved) against their nuclear ambitions.

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