Perspective
These are old facts, courtesy of A. J. Jacobs, but they bear repeating:
The Taiping Rebellion was a Chinese upheaval in the mid-nineteenth century that took an estimated 20,000,000 lives. Our own bloody Civil War, which occurred around the same time, took only about 4 percent of that estimate.
On August 9, 1945, a B-29 spent 10 minutes over Kokura without sighting its aim point. It then proceeded to its secondary target, Nagasaki. I didn't know that Kokura was the primary target for that atomic bomb. Strange to think the subtle things that change the course of history.