I'm now reading The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. As I remember from reading Dead Wake and Devil in the White City, Larson's style infuses the feel of a novel on straight history (though he's not quite as much fun to read as the somewhat fictionalized Kopp Sisters series).
One thing that struck me early on (p. 75) was why Churchill so valued Frederick Lindemann AKA The Prof, as summed up in one brief observation:
The Prof delighted in coming up with ideas that turned conventional beliefs upside down. Once, as he walking with a colleague, Donald MacDougall, he saw a poster that admonished, "Stop that dripping tap," an exhortation meant to conserve water and thereby save the coal that fueled the water-distribution system. As he walked, the Prof began calculating the cost in energy, wood pulp, and shipping needed to produce the paper for the poster. "and Of course," MacDougall recalled, "Prof was right in his initial suspicions that it all added up to enormously more than was going to be saved by the posters' advice being followed."
Yet, those who put up the poster feel they are fulfilling a patriotic duty and would delight in castigating the waste of others. We see that over 75 years later, we repeat the same exact error. If anything, we've gotten worse at elevating virtue-signaling that actually takes up more resources than the ones that are saved by the recommended actions.
Related: Hopping Around History
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