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There’s a lot of renewed pride and awe going around regarding the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, but what if we’d explored an alternate method of collecting lunar samples and bringing them back home? What if we’d just lobbed an atomic bomb at the old ball of cheese and simply scooped up the debris with a net?
Here’s a really good idea for anyone in charge of public spectacles and festivities in a war torn and jumpy area: don’t schedule a fireworks display. You’ll find it terrifies more than amuses. Shooting off fireworks amid an entire population racked with PTSD is tantamount to the Little Albert study. We know this for a fact now, thanks to an unfortunate natural experiment conducted in the village of Goma in Congo, as Reuters tells it. When the display began, the villagers used Occam’s Razor and decided that likeliest explanation was that the six-year-old peace had collapsed once more rather than it being just, you know, fireworks, and headed for the hills. One can imagine a local bureaucrat trailing after the rest of the town with a clipboard shouting, “Hey guys! Where are you going? Guys?”
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