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Sure — whenever it is useful in interpreting a public museum or historic site. That means any historic site where a Confederate flag flew between 1861 and 1865. (I’m assuming the question refers to actually flying the flag from a pole, not including it in a museum exhibit, for instance.)In some cases flying a Confederate flag would be gratuitous, even where a historical case can be made. For example, Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon, Georgia preserves Native American burial mounds and an underground meeting chamber that date back many centuries. Archaeologists have also discovered evidence of Confederate trench fortifications on the site, built to help defend the city of Macon from William T. Sherman’s U.S. army. But reconstructing those fortifications or flying a Confederate flag there would degrade the site’s primary purpose, which is to interpret the ancient history of the place. It would be a case of undue emphasis.Other public sites where one or more Confederate national flags could be flown (but don’t have to be, of course) include:National Park Service historic sites related to the Confederacy (e.g., Appomattox Court House)[1]State historic sites related to the Confederacy (e.g., Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Fairview, Kentucky, where a massive obelisk commemorates the birthplace of the Confederate president)[2]I can think of one edge case, where a Confederate flag is flown on a private historic property that gets substantial public funding. It’s the house in Montgomery, Alabama, where Jefferson Davis lived when he began serving as president of the Confederacy. (The Confederate States proclaimed their independence in February 1861 at the Alabama State Capitol. By May they had moved the capital to Richmond, Virginia.) This “First White House of the Confederacy,” owned and operated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, would probably shut down within a month were it not for grants from the State of Alabama amounting to about $100,000 a year.The “First White House of the Confederacy” in Montgomery, Alabama. The flagpole is in the left foreground, just outside the frame of this picture. (Wikipedia)I’m no fan of the Confederacy and what it stood for, but I agree that this house should be preserved, at public expense, as a unique historic site. What’s more, I would have the state purchase the property outright and designate it as a protected publicly owned site. Critics have suggested that the reason this hasn’t happened is that keeping the site one step removed from public ownership allows for less accountability as to how the house’s history is interpreted for visitors. Those same critics point to the fact that a Confederate national flag flies there as evidence of a reactionary, pro-Confederate agenda. I don’t entirely agree. While the criticism of the UDC-run museum may be justified, I don’t think the flag proves anything. Because the house was a seat of the Confederate government, but no longer serves any function today, it’s appropriate to fly the Confederate national flag there as part of the recreation of the site’s history.Notice I said the Confederate national flag — the Stars and Bars — which looks like this.This is the Confederate flag that flies at the Jeff Davis house. It’s not the Confederate battle flag — the one that has become the favorite symbol of “heritage” groups, white supremacists, and a motley collection of other self-styled rebels around the world. That one looks like this.Civil War buffs delight in informing us that this isn’t even a “real” Confederate flag. The historic battle flag used by Confederate armies, and later impaled on the national flag, was square, not rectangular. True, the Confederate naval jack was a rectangle with the same design as is shown here, but the blue was a significantly lighter shade. In a nutshell, the so-called Confederate flag of today never was an official flag of the Confederacy. No, it is more accurately described as the flag of Confederate commemoration — in other words, it’s the flag of the Lost Cause.[3]What is the Lost Cause? It is the belief that —even though we of the South have all acknowledged defeat, rejoined the Union, and become patriotic Americans — the Confederates were in the right. It’s the belief, moreover, that if people are still hostile to the Confederate cause, it’s because they don’t understand it. The Civil War wasn’t fought to defend slavery, you see. Perish the thought! And anyway slavery was a benevolent institution that cost slaveholders more than it earned them, don’t you see. No, the war began because the South was threatened by the North — the threat was all on one side, you see — and the Constitution was also at risk. The core issue was state’s rights — a vague principle that means, in essence, that the federal government should never do anything that one personally disapproves of. If it does, then it is tyrannical. And this is why the Civil War — I mean, the War Between the States — was fought. That whole emancipation thing was just an afterthought.In case you’re wondering, every statement in that previous paragraph is fiction. If time and space were endless, I could enlarge at length on each claim, but that is beyond the scope of this question. The thing is, this southern revisionism set the tone of Civil War history for most of the 20th century, and not just in the South. This was partly because of a strong impulse to reconcile after the war, and partly because of northern racism. Unwilling to actually accept black folk as equal citizens, northern and western politicians quickly tired of defending black lives, liberty, and property. They let the southern states handle “the Negro problem.” Without enough white allies, black people lacked the power to maintain their claims on the American promise of equal justice under law.By the early 20th century both white supremacy and the rectangular battle flag (the Lost Cause banner) were on a roll. As Union and Confederate veterans came together for battlefield reunions and reconciliation ceremonies (from which black Union veterans were soon quietly excluded), the southern veterans carried the flag of the Lost Cause to represent their side. By the 1930s it was the Confederate flag, and it appears as such in the 1939 movie Gone With the Wind, a milestone in Confederate mythologizing. The flag was widely accepted as a symbol of southernness as well. Black southerners’ opinions on the subject were neither solicited nor welcomed.After World War II the flag gradually took on a new significance, as federally ordered desegregation encountered massive resistance from white southerners. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which defined school segregation as unconstitutional, really lit the fire under defenders of segregation. Once again the issue was “state’s rights” and “the southern way of life.” This is when the Rebel flag went up for the first time over state capitol buildings, in the offices of southern governors, and at the campaign stops of would-be governors. Bigoted protesters waved the Rebel flag as they screamed racist epithets at black schoolchildren. White high school students carried it as they walked out of classes in protest against integration. Alabama governor George Wallace, famous for his vow of “segregation forever,” prominently used it in his presidential campaigns — until he realized that he had supporters outside the South, and most of them didn’t like that flag.This history explains why it’s not OK to display a Confederate flag on public property. Yes, it is a symbol of southern heritage and pride, but that’s not all it is. Unlike the real Confederate flags that actually flew in 1861–65, the Lost Cause banner that we erroneously call “the Confederate flag” has been the chosen banner of white supremacists and of segregationist state governments. When flown on public property, it implies the same thing today that it did in 1954, namely, that in the eyes of this state all Americans are not equal and only those who look “white” are entitled to the full rights and privileges of citizenship. So it should never be flown on public property, even a historic site. Only the authentic Confederate flags should be flown there, and only for the purpose of historical interpretation.Flags of the Confederate States of America - WikipediaFootnotes[1] Appomattox Court House National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)[2] Jefferson Davis State Historic Site[3] Lost Cause of the Confederacy - Wikipedia

Who’s the most badass scientist ever? How about someone who mindf#cked “the greatest living scientist” of his time…… as well as the most powerful political force of his time (pre-WW2)…… as well as the ideas that formed the very foundation of physics itself (and by extension the foundation of our industrial civilization)?Someone who made a key contribution in the creation of the first atomic bomb, and also foretold, in stunning precision and long before any political leader realized it, of the unprecedented promise of global peace and international cooperation that our ability to harness nuclear energy brings, and also the unprecedented threat it poses to our existence if nations don’t come together.And someone who didn’t just stop at theorizing or philosophizing the idea that nations that have fought each other for centuries could coalesce for a greater good but actually made it happen, when he led an effort that brought twelve European countries together to create the first truly international research organization, which today operates the world’s pre-eminent particle physics laboratory, and also is the birthplace of a little thing called The World Wide Web:One of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, a philosopher who pondered some of the most inscrutable aspects of the very nature of reality itself, but also a prescient realist and a connoisseur of international politics who could influence leaders of nations to do good! Almost a mythical hero, from the land of Hans Christian Andersen, his name was Niels Henrik David Bohr.Badassery Exhibit A: At age 20, refined Lord Rayleigh’s theory and methods of measuring surface tension of liquids. To quote Wikipedia:In 1905, a gold medal competition was sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters to investigate a method for measuring the surface tension of liquids that had been proposed by Lord Rayleigh in 1879. This involved measuring the frequency of oscillation of the radius of a water jet. Bohr conducted a series of experiments using his father's laboratory in the university; the university itself had no physics laboratory. To complete his experiments, he had to make his own glassware, creating test tubes with the required elliptical cross-sections. He went beyond the original task, incorporating improvements into both Rayleigh's theory and his method, by taking into account the viscosity of the water, and by working with finite amplitudes instead of just infinitesimal ones. His essay, which he submitted at the last minute, won the prize. He later submitted an improved version of the paper to the Royal Society in London for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.Badassery Exhibit B: Gave birth to a new physics. In the 1880s, physicists Johann Balmer and Johannes Rydberg discovered that the wavelengths of the emitted light in the spectrum of hydrogen follow a simple pattern:where R(H) is a constant, called the Rydberg constant for hydrogen (approximately 10967758 m^−1), and n1, n2 are just natural numbers (n2 > n1).For decades, no one could explain why this happens. Then, in 1911, Ernest Rutherford put forth his solar-system-like model of the atom: negatively charged electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus. The main issue with this model was that it violates classical electrodynamics, which says that in such a system the electron would gradually lose its energy and spiral into the nucleus, thus making the whole system unstable. At this juncture, in 1913, Bohr had the seminal insight that the fixed wavelength values of hydrogen spectrum found by Balmer and Rydberg can be simply explained as energy emitted by electrons jumping from a higher-energy orbit to a lower-energy orbit. Applying Max Planck’s quantum theory to define the energy of the electron, he was able to calculate the value of the Rydberg constant for hydrogen which matched the experimentally observed value. Thus Bohr proposed a refined version of Rutherford’s model which stated that even though electrons are negatively charged and they do orbit the positively charged nucleus, they do so in specific orbits of quantized energy levels in which they do not gradually lose energy, but only do so when they jump from a higher quantum level to a lower quantum level, by emitting radiation with energy equaling the difference of energy between the levels.The implication of such a finding was momentous! It meant that classical mechanics, which had been successfully describing the motion of heavenly bodies (mostly) to the movement of most everyday objects, is woefully inadequate in explaining processes at the subatomic level, and must be superseded by a new physics — which is what we today call the Quantum Mechanics.Badassery Exhibit C: Transformed our understanding of the periodic table of elements. The German chemist Johann Döbereiner made the first known attempt to classify elements on the basis of similarity in their physicochemical properties, when he grouped 12 elements into 4 “triads” (chlorine-bromine-iodine, lithium-sodium-potassium, sulfur-selenium-tellurium and calcium-strontium-barium) in the 1820s. (It’s interesting to note that such triads actually do exist in the modern periodic table taking only naturally occurring elements into account, e.g. zinc-cadmium-mercury, copper-silver-gold, etc.!!) He also noted that the atomic weight of the middle element in a triad was somehow very close to the mean of those of the other two! Then, as a lot more elements got discovered and their atomic weights measured, multiple chemists started noticing (in the 1860s) that if ordered by increasing atomic weight, elements display similar properties at regular intervals, and not just in groups of threes! The most notable among them, Dmitri Mendeleev, was able to classify all known elements into 8 Groups, in what he called Periodicheskaya Tablitsa Elementov, Russia’s single biggest contribution to science!But of course, there were problems with this arrangement, for example, it was found that iodine is actually lighter than tellurium, even though it has to be placed after tellurium in order to group them with similar elements! Also, Mendeleev placed iron-ruthenium-osmium in the same group with copper-silver-gold (Group VIII) even though there are significant differences in their properties – in fact, he got a bit confused and suggested that copper-silver-gold might belong to Group I instead! In the end, the discovery of isotopes was this periodic table’s final death knell because it meant that two atoms of the same element can have different weights (and two atoms of different elements can have the same weight, for example, an atom of carbon can have the same weight as an atom of nitrogen), hence the atomic weight is not at all something that defines an element in the first place!At this juncture, the team of Bohr, Rutherford, Henry Moseley and others at Cambridge made some major discoveries that unwrapped many of the remaining mysteries of the atomic constitution, including the discovery of the proton, the concept of the Atomic Number as the unique identifier of an element as opposed to the atomic weight, and the fact that the atomic number is nothing but the number of protons in the atom, which is equal to the nuclear charge of the atom, which is then equal to the number of electrons in the atom (in neutral state). These discoveries made it clear that instead of atomic weight, the elements should be arranged by the atomic number in the periodic table, which did resolve questions such as how tellurium precedes iodine, etc. but couldn’t offer a solution for the other issues, let alone explain what really causes the periodicity…At this time, Bohr, working with Arnold Sommerfeld, Wolfgang Pauli and others, turned his attention to using quantum physics to understand how electrons are distributed in different orbitals in atoms of different elements, and formulated what became known as the Aufbauprinzip or “building-up principle”. They realized that the electrons don’t just exist in the primary orbitals but in various sub-shells within the orbitals, which they called s, p, d and f, and defined the order of increasing energy of these sub-shells, which determines (along with Pauli’s Exclusion Principle and other laws), when we move from one element to the next, where the new electron is added.Using these principles, they worked out the electron configurations of various elements, which looked like this:The pattern was unmissable! Bohr realized that the “similar” elements in the periodic table are similar simply because they have the same electron configurations in the outermost sub-shells of their atoms! For example, alkali metals like lithium, sodium, etc. always end with ns1, alkaline earth metals (beryllium, magnesium, calcium, etc.) with ns2, boron-aluminum-gallium-… with np1, carbon-silicon-germanium-… with np2, and so on. Although there were some exceptions (mainly the “transition metals” like chromium, copper, and the series from niobium to silver), based on overall similarities, all elements could now be classified into 18 groups (32 if including lanthanides and actinides)… and thus the modern periodic table was born.This fact that an element's physicochemical (macro) properties are nothing but manifestations of the arrangement of electrons in its atom (micro) is one of the most supremely important discoveries in the history of science, the ultimate confluence of physics and chemistry, and a triumph of quantum theory!! If it were to happen today, Bohr would immediately win his second Nobel prize, possibly in chemistry, but in an age where new elements and isotopes were being discovered and created almost on daily basis, he missed out!!!Badassery Exhibit D: Stood up to Einstein to defend own theory, and prevailed. Between 1925 and ‘27, Bohr, along with Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and others, developed what came to be known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, centered around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Born’s Born Rule of the probabilistic wave function, and Bohr’s Complementarity Principle of wave-particle duality. This interpretation essentially proposed that:physical systems generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probability distribution of a given measurement's possible results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement.While many physicists were in a state of dismay and awe at the mathematical ingenuity of this theory, Einstein came out with strong disagreement. He simply refused to accept that physical realities could be just statistical probabilities and couldn’t be measured beyond a certain degree of accuracy, summed up in his famous remark “God doesn’t throw dice”. The Solvay Conference of 1927 brought this bitter conflict out in the open.Over dinner, during after-dinner discussions, and at breakfast, Einstein debated with Bohr and his followers on the question whether quantum mechanics in its present form could be called complete. Einstein illustrated his points with increasingly clever thought experiments intended to prove that position and momentum could in principle be simultaneously known to arbitrary precision. For example, one of his thought experiments involved sending a beam of electrons through a shuttered screen, recording the positions of the electrons as they struck a photographic screen. Bohr and his allies would always be able to counter Einstein's proposal, usually by the end of the same day… By 1928, the consensus was that Einstein had lost the debate, and even his closest allies… conceded that quantum mechanics appeared to be complete.But 3 years later, at the next Solvay Conference, Einstein came prepared for a smackdown…He proposed another thought experiment, known as Einstein’s Box.Einstein considers a box containing electromagnetic radiation and a clock which controls the opening of a shutter which covers a hole made in one of the walls of the box. The shutter uncovers the hole for a time Δt which can be chosen arbitrarily. During the opening, we are to suppose that a photon, from among those inside the box, escapes through the hole. In this way a wave of limited spatial extension has been created, following the explanation given above. In order to challenge the indeterminacy relation between time and energy, it is necessary to find a way to determine with adequate precision the energy that the photon has brought with it. At this point, Einstein turns to his celebrated relation between mass and energy of special relativity: E = mc^2. From this it follows that knowledge of the mass of an object provides a precise indication about its energy. The argument is therefore very simple: if one weighs the box before and after the opening of the shutter and if a certain amount of energy has escaped from the box, the box will be lighter. The variation in mass multiplied by c^2 will provide precise knowledge of the energy emitted. Moreover, the clock will indicate the precise time at which the event of the particle's emission took place. Since, in principle, the mass of the box can be determined to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, the energy emitted can be determined with a precision ΔE as accurate as one desires. Therefore, the product ΔEΔt can be rendered less than what is implied by the principle of indeterminacy.This challenge shell-shocked Bohr, “who, at first, could not think of a solution. For the entire evening he was extremely agitated, and he continued passing from one scientist to another, seeking to persuade them that it could not be the case, that it would have been the end of physics if Einstein were right; but he couldn't come up with any way to resolve the paradox”, remembers fellow attendee Leon Rosenfeld, “I will never forget the image of the two antagonists as they left the club: Einstein, with his tall and commanding figure, who walked tranquilly, with a mildly ironic smile, and Bohr who trotted along beside him, full of excitement.” (Below is an actual photo of this!)However, the next morning, Bohr dealt the knockout punch, using the relativistic time dilation principles of Einstein himself (also called Gravitational Redshift):1. After emitting a photon, the loss of weight causes the box to rise in the gravitational field.2. The observer returns the box to its original height by adding weights until the pointer points to its initial position. It takes a certain amount of time t for the observer to perform this procedure. How long it takes depends on the strength of the spring and on how well-damped the system is. If undamped, the box will bounce up and down forever. If over-damped, the box will return to its original position sluggishly.3. The longer that the observer allows the damped spring-mass system to settle, the closer the pointer will reach its equilibrium position. At some point, the observer will conclude that his setting of the pointer to its initial position is within an allowable tolerance. There will be some residual error Δq in returning the pointer to its initial position. Correspondingly, there will be some residual error Δm in the weight measurement.4. Adding the weights imparts a momentum p to the box which can be measured with an accuracy Δp delimited by ΔpΔq ≈ h. It is clear that Δp < gtΔm where g is the gravitational constant. Plugging in yields gtΔmΔq > h.5. General relativity informs us that while the box has been at a height different than its original height, it has been ticking at a rate different than its original rate. The red shift formula informs us that there will be an uncertainty Δt = c^-2gtΔq in the determination of t0, the emission time of the photon.6. Hence, c^2ΔmΔt = ΔEΔt > h. The accuracy with which the energy of the photon is measured restricts the precision with which its moment of emission can be measured, following the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.Einstein never attacked the basics of the Bohr school of quantum mechanics again!Badassery Exhibit E: Outmaneuvered the Nazis over and over. Unlike many Jewish academics who left Europe in the wake of Nazi aggression, Bohr stood his ground till the very end, and put considerable effort to get a number of Jewish scientists out of Germany and Nazi-occupied parts of Europe to the relative safety of his Institute For Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen, and later used his connections with the Danish resistance to dispatch them to Sweden and other safe countries. Those that he helped include Guido Beck, Felix Bloch, James Franck, George de Hevesy, Otto Frisch, Hilde Levi, Lise Meitner, George Placzek, Eugene Rabinowitch, Stefan Rozental, Erich Ernst Schneider, Edward Teller, Arthur von Hippel and Victor Weisskopf.Now, one of these guys, James Franck, had kept his Nobel prize medal with Bohr for safekeeping, and so had the non-Jewish but vehemently anti-Nazi physicist Max von Laue. As German tanks finally rolled into Copenhagen (April 1940), keeping the two medals out of German hand was Bohr’s primary concern (he had donated his own medal to an auction for the benefit of a fund helping the war-affected Finns a few weeks before this). And just losing the medals was not the only worry! In Hitler’s Germany it was almost a capital offense to send gold out of the country. Since the names of the laureates were engraved on the medals, their discovery by the invading forces would have had very serious consequences for Bohr (and also for von Laue who was in Germany). Bohr knew that the Germans knew that certain Nobel laureates had kept their medals with Bohr and were determined to find them, hence he decided he couldn’t risk the medals being discovered intact. With no other alternative and the Gestapo almost at doorstep, he, with help of George de Hevesy, decided to science his way out!They went to the chemistry lab, grabbed the supply of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid and mixed a deadly cocktail that was first mentioned by Arab alchemists a thousand years ago, called Aqua Regia — “regal water” — the only known liquid that can dissolve gold! Hurriedly dissolving the medals in the acid, they kept the flask in an ordinary place in the lab, amidst dozens of similar-looking flasks containing sundry chemical solutions! The Germans came, and ransacked the entire Institute for years looking for the medals, as Bohr stayed put at Copenhagen.The reason he could stay there, however, was because the German occupation of Denmark was by far the most peaceful of all Nazi-occupied countries. German propaganda even referred to Denmark as the "model protectorate". The king retained his throne and the Danish government continued to function…… and the Danes managed to exact an extraordinary price for this cooperation:Danish officials repeatedly insisted to the German occupation authorities that there was no "Jewish problem" in Denmark. The Germans recognized that discussion of the "Jewish question" in Denmark was a possibly explosive issue… the German Reich relied substantially upon Danish agriculture, which supplied meat and butter to 3.6 million Germans in 1942. As a result… even ideologically committed Nazis… followed a strategy of avoiding and deferring any discussion of Denmark's Jews.In mid-1943, however, having seen German defeats in Russia and North Africa, Danes began to show their displeasure with the occupation, in form of nationwide strikes and increased sabotage activities by the Danish resistance. Finally the German authorities gave the Danish government an ultimatum on August 28, demanding a ban on strikes, a curfew, and the punishment of sabotage with the death penalty. The Danish government rejected this demand and resigned the next day, resulting in direct administration of Denmark by the German authorities, who immediately drew up plans to start rounding up the Jews from early October. In response, the Jews started going into hiding, but that would not save them for long. The best way out was to get Sweden to offer them asylum till the end of the war but the Swedes refused to officially announce anything, in order to avoid increased confrontation with the Germans.In this situation, Bohr decided to throw his weight behind the issue. He contacted Danish resistance and planned an escape to Sweden. (Somehow the Nazis got wind of it and went after him at his home. As they entered through the front door, the 58-year-old Bohr ran out the back, with Danish resistance laying down cover fire, allowing him to slip out and get on a fishing boat!) As he reached Sweden, the government representatives told him that an aircraft was waiting to take him to United States where his expertise was needed in some “special government projects”. Bohr responded that he would not be going anywhere until the fate of his country’s Jews was secure, and requested an audience with the King to discuss the matter. King Gustaf V granted the audience on the afternoon of October 2, it’s said, after a persuasive call from Greta Garbo, who knew Bohr! A few hours later, the Swedish radio broadcast that Sweden was ready to receive the Jews!A massive rescue operation then began to smuggle the 7800-strong Danish Jewry across the Øresund, through the prying eyes of German patrol, and ultimately an estimated 7220 (plus 686 non-Jewish spouses) were able to reach the Swedish shores, making Danish Jews, out of the Jewish populations of all Nazi-occupied countries, the least affected by the Holocaust.Having secured the safety of the Danish Jews, Bohr finally decided to leave for the United States, via Britain. Stockholm was crawling with German agents, and there was a credible threat that he could be assassinated. To fly him to Britain over the dangerous North Sea, the British sent an unarmed Mosquito bomber, a light, fast aircraft that could fly high enough to avoid the German anti-aircraft batteries. At the opportune hour, Bohr donned a flight suit, strapped on a parachute, took delivery of the flight helmet with built-in earphones for communication with the cockpit, and lay on his back in the bomb bay. The pilot also supplied him with a stick of flares — in case the plane was hit and couldn’t make it to British mainland, the pilot was to open the bomb bay doors and drop Bohr into the sea; a following sea plane was then to pick him up… if he survived the fall using his parachute and was able to signal his location using the flares!Ultimately, although those scenarios didn’t unfold, something did go wrong during the flight — the helmet given to Bohr turned out to be quite small, and he couldn’t wear it (“The Royal Air Force was not used to such great heads as Bohr’s”, quips Robert Oppenheimer!), hence when the plane reached high altitude and the pilot instructed Bohr to turn on the oxygen supply, he didn’t hear anything, and soon passed out due to lack of oxygen. Thankfully the pilot realized what had happened, and descended to a lower altitude, saving Bohr’s life!By the way, what happened to the two Nobel prize medals dissolved in aqua regia at Bohr’s Institute at Copenhagen? After the war, as Bohr and de Hevesy returned to the institute, they found that flask exactly as they had left it! They carefully extracted the gold from the solution and sent it to the Swedish Academy, with a letter explaining the situation — the Nobel Foundation then recast the medals from the same gold and re-presented them to Franck and von Laue!!!!!Badassery Exhibit F: Saved America’s plutonium bomb project. Ok, “saved” may be a slight exaggeration but he did make a critical contribution without which the project would get delayed by many months, consequently delaying the Japanese surrender and causing countless more loss of life. The scientists at the Manhattan project were working on two types of bombs. One was straightforward: it consisted of two sub-critical masses of U-235, one containing a neutron source. When the bomb is to be detonated, one of the masses will be inserted into the other, resulting in criticality, and thence the explosive chain reaction. The other approach was to build an implosion device, in which a number of high-explosive charges will go off at the same time imploding a hollow sphere of plutonium (with neutron source at center) to a critical mass. There were serious challenges with both approaches. Even though the uranium bomb was straightforward, the supply of U-235, which is present in uranium in very small amounts, was not adequate for mass production. On the other hand, plutonium was being produced in the nuclear reactors abundantly but building a properly functioning implosion device turned out to be a formidable engineering challenge, the most complex aspect of which was designing that neutron source, called the “modulated neutron initiator”: a device that would produce a burst of neutrons to initiate the chain reaction at the optimal moment when the configuration is “prompt critical”! “The device remained a stubborn puzzle”, noted project director Oppenheimer, which he needed Bohr to crack. Finally in February 1945, under Bohr’s guidance the team succeeded in building the device, and within 5 months the first plutonium bomb was successfully tested.Badassery Exhibit G: Realized the far-reaching consequences of the atomic bomb, sought to bring the Russians in confidence “before there could be any question of use of atomic weapons” and proposed formation of an international body governing the use of nuclear energy, before anyone else. Whereas most scientists at Manhattan project regarded building the bomb as dealing with an existential threat i.e. the (possible) Nazi-made atomic bomb, one wonders if Bohr had some insider information that the German nuclear bomb project was a dud, which made him worry less about the immediate use of the bomb and ponder more about the future, in which “means will be found to simplify the methods of production of the active substances and intensify their effects to an extent which may permit any nation… to command powers of destruction surpassing all previous imagination… Quite apart from the role atomic weapons might come to play in the war [meaning WW2], it was clear that permanent grave dangers to world security would ensue unless measures to prevent abuse of the new formidable means of destruction could be universally agreed upon and carried out.”(Or perhaps, as an ardent believer in the philosophy of complementarity, Bohr could see more clearly than others how the promise of a lasting global peace and international concourse and even cleaner environment went hand in hand with the specter of utter ruin, in the context of unlocking the limitless energy of the atom.)Furthermore, whereas no top-level scientist or official in Britain/America could imagine that the Russians could get the bomb any time soon, Bohr happened to know better.In April 1944, he received a letter from [Russian Nuclear Physicist] Peter Kapitza, written some months before when Bohr was in Sweden, inviting him to come to the Soviet Union. The letter convinced Bohr that the Soviets were aware of the Anglo-American project, and would strive to catch up. He sent Kapitza a non-committal response, which he showed to the authorities in Britain before posting. Bohr met Churchill on 16 May 1944, but found that "we did not speak the same language". Churchill disagreed with the idea of openness towards the Russians to the point that he wrote in a letter: "It seems to me Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes."In America, however, Oppenheimer did see Bohr’s point, and suggested him to speak to POTUS!In that meeting (August 1944), Bohr submitted to Roosevelt what Churchill had failed to grasp: “the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergences... early consultations between the nations allied in the war about the best ways jointly to obtain future security might contribute decisively to that atmosphere of mutual confidence which would be essential for co-operation on the many other matters of common concern”.Roosevelt was more understanding than Churchill and advised Bohr to return to Britain to get their approval, as he could not take this decision on his own. However, in 3 weeks’ time, Roosevelt and Churchill had a meeting, where they discussed Bohr’s proposals, and unfortunately, Churchill succeeded in convincing Roosevelt to outright reject them (further noting: “enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians”). As a direct result of this, for next 7 decades (and likely to continue for untold more decades to come) America and Russia spent trillions of Dollars building, safeguarding, modernizing and also partially dismantling an arsenal of over a hundred thousand nuclear warheads, some of which are kept on hair-trigger alert, ready to snuff out humanity in a nuclear winter.Even after being snubbed by short-sighted, xenophobic, jingoistic politicians, Bohr kept trying. Between 1945 and ’48, he wrote several memos to US statesmen, and even met the Secretary of State, but all his warnings/suggestions were summarily ignored.And then… everything changed.On September 1,1949, the US Air Force Office of Atomic Energy found the first evidence of a Soviet nuclear test (actually conducted, in utter secrecy, 3 days earlier), sending shockwaves (figuratively speaking!) through Truman administration, from which they took 3 weeks to recover in order to announce the news to public! With the people in power finally forced to pay attention, Bohr decided to put together all his thoughts about how to deal with this most extraordinary crisis in the history of our species, in an “Open Letter”, presented to the United Nations on June 9, 1950. The letter was not just “open” in name but also in spirit, and substance! In it, he candidly talked about his own failure to convince the British/American leaders about the dangerous consequences of them unilaterally developing nuclear weapons and then using them in war without sharing any information with the Soviets and greater international community, and also alleged that this discretion was a key reason behind the deepening divide between the wartime allies despite conciliatory efforts of the UN:When the war ended and the great menaces of oppression to so many peoples had disappeared, an immense relief was felt all over the world. Nevertheless, the political situation was fraught with ominous foreboding. Divergences in outlook between the victorious nations inevitably aggravated controversial matters arising in connection with peace settlements. Contrary to the hopes for future fruitful co-operation, expressed from all sides and embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, the lack of mutual confidence soon became evident. The creation of new barriers, restricting the free flow of information between countries, further increased distrust and anxiety.He asserted that for our civilization to endure, and progress, in the nuclear age, nations must embrace a culture of “mutual openness” and “genuine cooperation”: “barriers between nations which hitherto were thought necessary for the defence of national interests would now… stand in the way of common security”. He advocated building “an open world”, where scientific information is exchanged freely between nations, noting that this “may appear utopian” but “such a course should be in the deepest interest of all nations, irrespective of differences in social and economic organization” because “the progress of science and technology has tied the fate of all nations inseparably together”.(It’s interesting to note that this letter coincided with the Stockholm Appeal initiative, which called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapon, and went viral throughout the West but ultimately failed to achieve anything substantial. Bohr was pragmatic enough to avoid any such appeal in his letter!)Lastly, he prescribed the creation of an international organization for monitoring and controlling the nuclear activities of every nation:Any arrangement which can offer safety against secret preparations for the mastery of the new means of destruction would… demand extraordinary measures. In fact, not only would universal access to full information about scientific discoveries be necessary, but every major technical enterprise, industrial as well as military, would have to be open to international control…. Detailed proposals for the establishment of an effective control would have to be worked out with the assistance of scientists and technologists appointed by the governments concerned, and a standing expert committee, related to an international security organization, might be charged with keeping account of new scientific and technical developments and with recommending appropriate adjustments of the control measures.7 years later, the world finally had to create this organization:The same year (1957), Bohr was honored with the first ever Atoms For Peace award.Badassery Exhibit H: Co-founded CERN. As Bohr got increasingly frustrated with his repeated appeals to enforce collaboration between Anglo-American and Soviet nuclear scientists falling to deaf ears, in the end he decided to do something on his own, in a place where he had a little more influence: Western Europe. Working with a few nuclear physicists still left there, he mobilized a massive effort to convince European countries to join together to build a cutting-edge research center that could help European nuclear physics rise again to its pre-war glory — an institute built along the lines of the national laboratories in the US, designed to undertake Big Science projects beyond the resources of any one country alone.In June 1950, the same month he submitted his open letter to the UN, a resolution was tabled at UNESCO to "assist and encourage the formation of regional research laboratories in order to increase international scientific collaboration". A year and half later, the first resolution concerning the establishment of a European Council for Nuclear Research (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) was adopted. On September 29, 1954, following ratification by France and Germany (with Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and Yugoslavia to follow), CERN was born. (Bohr wanted the center to be set up in Copenhagen but in view of the future needs of the organization to scale up, agreed on the location on France-Switzerland border, in the suburbs of Geneva. The CERN Theory Group, which Bohr headed, was based in Copenhagen until their new accommodation in Geneva was ready, in 1957.)As nuclear physics research steadily declined in the US post the seventies, CERN gradually became its de facto global headquarters, achieving major breakthroughs like the discovery of neutral currents and W and Z bosons, creation of antihydrogen, and detection of the Higgs boson, the ultimate holy grail of particle physics, vindicating Bohr’s belief that in science, the best way to go faster and farther is to go together.I rest my case.Upvote if you agree!Sources:Niels Bohr - Wikipediahttps://www.gutenberg.org/files/47464/47464-pdf.pdfHistory of the periodic table - WikipediaAufbau principle - WikipediaBohr–Einstein debates - WikipediaEinstein's thought experiments - WikipediaA unique gold medalNiels Bohr’s Flight From the Nazis Was a Science DramaRescue of the Danish Jews - WikipediaBohr Letter to UN

I can answer this to a degree, contextualized through my own experience as a highly trained immigrant to Oslo, Norway, from Croatia, a small South-East European country with a load of economic and political problems. My experiences may not be representative of other personal conditions and particular destinies.PreambleIn Which We Meet Our Hero.After completing my Ph.D. in Automation (Electrical Engineering) in 2012, with the focus on Marine Robotics / Cybernetics I decided to look for employment outside my country. I had previously had limited experiences living in the UK and US. I had previously lived for 1 year in the UK while I was lower sixth form, in a public boarding school (public, confusingly, means private in the UK, and boarding school is the one where you live in the school). Lower sixth form in the UK is the penultimate year of secondary / high school, so I guess, high school junior in the US? Kids aged roughly 16 - 18, mode on 17. In the US, I lived during a three month research stint tied to my Ph.D. research on a scholarship in Monterey, CA, researching in the Naval Postgraduate School. I had also traveled extensively during my Ph.D. around Europe and to a lesser degree to the US and around the world. I speak English at the native speaker level.It took me about three quarters of a year to find a job in Norway, and I chose to concentrate on Norway for several reasons:During my studies, I had learned that Norway invests extreme amounts of money, even by the EU standards (i.e. the whole of EU through the Directorate for S&T's instrument called Framework Programme 7 before 2013, and now Horizon 2020), into marine technology and marine cybernetics research,Norway, although a small country, has a disproportionally large labor market, relatively speaking, for highly trained marine technology and marine cybernetics professionals, with globally operating Norwegian-based companies such as Kongsberg, Marine Cybernetics, DNV-GL, and multinationals with significant presence and marine technology operations in Norway, like ABB, GE, Siemens, Rolls Royce Marine, etc.Norway is in the same time-zone as Croatia, CET, and is 5 hours away by plane with one change-over somewhere in Western or Central Europe (usually Frankfurt, Munich, Copenhagen, Zurich, Brussels, or Vienna). During the summer, there are cheap seasonal flights directly to the coast by Ryanair. I have a lot of family in Croatia still, as well as friends, and like to be close.Norway is extremely socialist. I espouse socialist values, and, compared to other possible countries that would have an interest in an immigrant like me (a highly trained focused expert who might only be able to get paperwork based on his expertise and the real need of some company to employ a guy with such credentials), like Canada, the UK (Scotland), the US, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Hong Kong, it is the best governed. I am very wary of the US culture of over-work (although I grant that I may be misinformed or not have the proper understanding of how it looks in practice). This is especially true at a juncture in my life where I want to think hard and serious about starting a family and having a good work-life balance with respect to that. Norway also offers apt labor rights to employees, and a good amount of paid vacation, as well as paternity leave, health, social welfare programs etc. I consider the American approach to vacation (summed up as one word -- "No") to be uncivilized in the extreme.Norway is still essentially European. Any alienation that I may come to feel should at least be less than in the US, or in Asia.Norway is extremely family-friendly.Most critical to my experience, I had some connections in Norway that helped when competing in their labor market. So all that said, come February 2013, I packed my bags, sat on the plane, and arrived for a two weeks stay in a hotel before I found myself a place to live. The plane, the overweight luggage charges, and the two weeks of stay in the hotel near work were picked up by my company. Seeing as how the oil market has moved in the last two years, I would not expect to see the same happening again were I to get a job today. I also got a liaison in the Chamber of Commerce through my company's Global Mobility office who helped with paperwork, and, which turned out to be rather critical when comparing my story to those of other immigrants -- vetting and vouching for me with Norwegian landlords and essentially acting as my at-large factotum during the first few weeks, driving me around and setting me up as painlessly as humanly possible.Prior to getting the job I ultimately landed, I have to point out that the job-hunting embodied two vastly different experiences:With one company, I went through a protracted competitive and whittling-down process since they were advertising and hiring globally and for a very specific purpose. I begrudged the company for not going through the process more efficiently and communicating their ultimate choice (of another person) sooner. The process was drawn out, very formal, and without too much interaction save for one interview. They would have been happy to cover the travel costs for, from Croatia, had I not had a parallel activity in Norway at a date that was satisfactory for both, so I was already in the country. They were kind enough to send a chauffeur to the airport at Oslo, where I landed for my other activities, and drive me three hours to the company headquarters, and covered the price of the train back to Oslo. So a civilized, but largely faceless and formal process, with a tail end of waiting for the ultimate answer by far too long and slightly mismanaged in my opinion.With my ultimate company, it started with a friendly phone-call by a Technology Manager in charge of the unit that was interested in getting me, on the recommendation of mutual acquaintances who were kind enough to refer me. We had another chat with the unit manager, and the guy who would be my immediate manager after a week from the initial chat. Two weeks after that, they paid for me to come in for an in-person interview. This was not an advertised position essentially, but the company saw it as an opportunity to get the expertise that I embodied. So I was basically head-hunted personally and in a targeted way. They presented me with an offer right after the interview, and gave me three weeks to consider (it was right around the time of Christmas holidays, so companies would have shut down anyway for at least two weeks). I accepted. Very fast, very friendly, I didn't feel too much tension, and after the first experience, was duly impressed by their willingness to come to terms almost immediately.Now, finally, on to the actual experiences of living and working in Norway.Working in NorwayThe GoodWorking in a big multinational company in Norway is... well I don't have a good standard for comparison, having only worked in academia before my stint here, but in general -- nice, civilized, and interesting. It does have its share of frustrations, but I imagine that will be the case anywhere and everywhere. Now, my standard for comparison is Croatian business life and business practices, and e.g. American practices are in many respects even further removed. So, when I say "the internal administration seems to be fast and efficient", maybe for an American it would seem overly bureaucratic and convoluted, but then that person would run away screaming and insane from Croatia. That said -- my onboarding period was extremely efficiently handled. I got a nice office with modern, functional furniture (electrical motor for adjusting your desk, a fancy chair that has more ways of setting it up that I have cared to learn), a cellphone, a computer, 2 big screens, and other paraphernalia within the first week. Well, the laptop was a temporary hand-down that I got on the first day, to be followed by my own, brand new model in two weeks.The working language in my company is English, and at the time there were very many expats and international workers, so communication was never a problem. All Norwegians (at the workplace for sure, and I would wager -- most Norwegians in general, regardless of age, at least in Oslo) also speak quite good English, if with an unmistakable Scandinavian accent. But then again, I probably have an unmistakable Slavic accent, so there is that. The company also agreed to pay Norwegian language courses for me.Norwegians in general are practical, goal-oriented folk. They strike me as having a good balance between setting up workable and rational rules, and sticking to them, and being willing to adapt to a situation. Unlike Croatians, they have a can-do, positive outlook and don't have a particular Croatian trauma and obsession with not incurring any costs in doing business. You've got to spend money to earn money. And if the cost is rational, targeted, known in advance, and will lead to a business result, it gets paid quickly and efficiently.By and large, you can be very flexible with your time, involvement, vacation days, going to the doctor, or doing administration stuff with the state (although for that last one, there is not much need since most of the administration is digital and web-based). There are some restrictions if, unlike me, who works in R&D, you work "front line" in direct contact with customers and in the core business of the company. Then, work is driven by customer-imposed deadlines, and since we build complicated solutions that are systems constructed from components produced, shipped, and coordinated from factories around the world, you may have some constraints on when in particular you want to take your spring, summer, autumn, or winter vacation.Hierarchies in Norwegian companies are flat, and bosses don't command respect just by the virtue of being placed on top of you in the organization chart. They are rather approachable (if sometimes bland and non-committal if you insist on talking to them only about the business), and almost to a fault don't expect any obeisance or sycophancy. The right way to socialize with bosses is to talk about leisure, sports, the weather, travel etc.The "Bad" -- Well, the peculiar in any caseEven in globally operating companies with a multinational workforce, for getting ahead and being in the know, Norwegian is a must. Then again, Norwegians act extremely friendly and like it very much when you exhibit any interest in learning their language. However, I have seen that the feelings get mixed once you've established yourself as at least a mediocre speaker of Norwegian. As time passes, their enthusiasm for talking to you like they would to an idiot child decreases. They start "forgetting themselves" and begin to just talk normal in front of, or to you, and then are a little bit stumped when they see that you can't quite keep up. However, this is probably not strange. I try to think how the situation would play out in e.g. a Croatian company, and I can't in all honesty say that it would be much different. This is by and large true for a lot of things I will say in this section.Getting ahead, in the career sense, is absolutely predicated not only on learning Norwegian, but actively integrating into the Norwegian lifestyle, preferences, culture, and leisure time activities. Norwegians, somewhat like Croatians, are a small nation, so everybody knows everybody else, and networking and mingling are very important. Combined with the sometimes stifling Janteloven ("You shall not consider yourself to be better than anybody else. You are not, the society will not treat you as such, and you will get no more breaks or opportunities than anybody else."), this means that whom you know, who is a good friend, and who you've managed to impress with your personality and your good humor, is equally important to how good you actually are in whatever you do. On the other side of that coin, they still manage to be more meritocratic than Croatians, but Croatians are a byword for nepotism, corruption, and clientelism.Due to this deep-seated respect for the opinions of others and sense of community, decision-making and responsibility-taking, as well as exercise of authority is sometimes... challenging. The way they try to resolve this is by calling an irrational number of meetings, especially when the decision to be made is a multi-faceted one, with many valid arguments in favor of different courses of action. If there is no consensus, you can be sure there will be another meeting on the same issue. Ultimately, this sometimes undercuts business because in a lot of situations, it is important to be fast, rather than right. Especially in the really interesting problems, when it is simplistic in the first instance to try to frame the decision as right-or-wrong. This does feel nice for the people lower down on the pecking order because you get the sense that it truly is important (and it really is) what you think how the company, or your team, or your unit, should proceed on some matter. However, what I think many people fail to understand is that sometimes you either don't have an opinion, or would just like to get on with your work, in whichever way someone tells you to. Sometimes you just need information on how to proceed, and not a debate.Other than that, what I think I am noticing as frustrations or down-sides of the job have more to do with the nature of big corporations in general, than with anything uniquely Norwegian, like the Peters principle ("people tend to get promoted to their exact level of incompetence"). Also, if you are extremely efficient and effective in your work, and if your work is the company's core business and you are in the "front lines", which in my company means engineering the actual deliveries, your chances of getting promoted off of that front line are slim. Because you are indispensable right where you are right now. Whereas as a middle manager, your less-than-efficient-engineer colleague might do just as well. And that is largely true when you consider the job one rung on top of yours. But if you really want to advance along the entire ladder, you need that rung's experience to move forward and further. Not just for the sake of being a team leader.In that last respect, I've noticed that careers in Norwegian engineering companies have some of the nature of "switchback staircase". You get promoted by leaving a company, and stepping into a higher-up role in the other company. Then after some years you come back to the company in a yet higher role. This is something that happens in Norway -- companies often take people back, even after a period where these people have worked with a direct competitor.The UglyNothing really.Living in NorwayOslo And Public TransportNorway is a relatively non-urban country. Even Oslo, the biggest city, is quite small compared to some other European, and even Scandinavian cities, like Stockholm or Copenhagen. The government actually actively pursues the policy of decentralized development, and Norwegian people in general seem to not mind living in the country, or rather, actually prefer it. On top of questions of relative size, to me, who came from the capital of Croatia that is loosely the same size as Oslo (maybe 100 - 200 thousand inhabitants more, depending on how far you cast your statistical net), Oslo just doesn't feel very big. This is due to the fact that Oslo, which for me was quite unexpected since I tend to associate the trend much more with cities and towns in the US, is not very congested or urbanized, urban panning-wise. It has a relatively small urban center, surrounded by a lot of suburban sprawl of detached housing. While in Oslo the public transport infrastructure is good, that is not necessarily the case over all. Oslo has the T-bane, the semi-underground semi-overground light rail, a network of slow and meandering trams, a high speed underground railway connection between the eastern and western railway networks of Norway, buses, and ferries all operated by the same concern -- Ruter.no. Whenever the T-bane stops service (after midnight on weekdays and Sunday, and after 1 am on Friday and Saturday), even in Oslo getting around in public transport becomes a hassle.Nightlife, Social Life, Drinks, And TaxisThese leads me to segue into discussions of nightlife, social life, drinks, and taxis. When you are out and about in Oslo (and even more so in other cities and town) after hours, the only real efficient option of getting around is taxis (and Uber). Taxis are goddamned expensive, but so is almost anything else associated with urbanite nightlife. Drinks are ridiculous, as I am sure many of you already know. Prices of alcohol and nicotine products are extremely high on account of the punitive tariffs imposed by the government. This stance of the Norwegian society towards drinks and tobacco I find to be extremely hypocritical. If you consider that it is so damaging and dangerous -- ban it outright. However, I think every sane person can immediately recognize that this will not work. The Islamic world tried this, and still there is a lively black market for alcohol in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. This is one aspect of the otherwise quite accomplished Norwegian nanny state that I severely dislike. To a man from a culture that is the most... interesting, to put it diplomatically, mix of the Mediterranean and Slavic cultures, it is of supreme importance to have his beer or wine in peace and not have the nanny state look down upon you with a tsk-ing sound on its lips and a wagging finger on its hand.Other aspects of nightlife are equally expensive, and to add insult to injury, quite annoying as well. All nightclubs rigorously enforce fire rules (as all establishments in Norway in general rigorously enforce all of the rules all of the time), which results in scenes which I had for the longest of times considered, when I would see them on American TV shows like Friends to be some weird fiction. Namely those of people freezing their asses off in those pesky lines for admittance into nightclubs. More often than not, not without paying an exorbitant fee to top it off. Additionally, all premises that remain open after a given time (I don't know exactly, but I'd say maybe 10 pm) employ bouncers and guards, who are entitled to refuse you entry if they only judge you to be inebriated, or in general, a menace. For me, inebriation at a reasonable level is in no way necessarily connected with being a potential problem in a nightclub or bar. This has more to do with a person's experience in drinking, the set of cultural expectation about how to behave while out at night, and how drinking in general is perceived by the society.Inebriation, Pulling Tail, And FightingThen again, maybe that kind of practice is for the better in Norway, where people generally go for what I like to call the bipolar approach -- either they are stone-cold, dead-set, boring-the-pants-off-of-you sober, or fucked-up drunk beyond possibility of parole. There is no culture like in the Mediterranean countries (Italy, Spain, France, Greece) of being cheerfully tipsy, inhibitions-somewhat-released, comfortably buzzed. Where the buzz and the tipsiness sneaks up on you because you've been sipping wine with cheese, grapes, and nuts for the better part of the afternoon which somehow decided to turn into dead of night at some point. In Norway, like in the UK, you drink to get shit-faced, and that's the sole point of the exercise. Norwegians seem to regard alcohol exclusively as an intoxicant / drug, without a cultural patina associated with drinking as a social activity established through the course of history. As you wouldn't "sip" heroin or meth, but you'd shoot up in order to feel the psychotropic effects, so with alcohol.Additionally, compared to Croatians, and most Italians I've known, Norwegians have poor self-control when drinking. If I was inclined to not being particularly charitable, I'd wager that it was because they actually like that the alcohol gives them the excuse to act more outside of the bounds of what is normally expected of them. More in tune with their id, as opposed to their nanny-state-moderated, Janteloven-totting superego. It is not uncommon (not particularly common, but in my subjective experience also not uncommon enough) to see drunken Norwegians getting into fights with each other. The kind of fights entered in are more a case of peacocking and signalling, then of wishing to actually do someone lasting harm. For me, this was extremely scary, because in Croatia, you fight if a) you're a sociopath thug, b) you've been assaulted by a sociopath thug. In both cases, you fight hard, fast, dirty, and for dear life. No amount of alcohol will cause adult socially functioning Croatians to consider getting into a fight over sports, women, or political opinions. Of course, there are crazies, sociopaths, psychopaths, bullies, hooligans, and thugs everywhere. And the reason why normal tax-paying upstanding citizens don't like to posture aggressively and invite for fights is that what might happen once the proverbial bro proverbially comes at you is that you (or him) get curb-stomped, you get your family jewels kicked out from underneath you, or a knife finds its way to a fist-fight, or a gun finds its way to a knife-fight.Additionally, it is really funny (and recently, for reasons of changed personal circumstances, also somewhat frustrating) to observe Norwegian mating rituals. Norwegians are, in the opinion of this reviewer, notoriously bad at play-of-words, double entendres, and seduction in general. They congregate into bars in unisex groups, proceed to drink themselves into a stupor, without making much effort to communicate with the opposite number. Once comfortably smashed out of their brains, they proceed to play touch-heavy, and bumble that they "like each other", which basically means they want to have sex. After which more often then not, they do (fortunately, mostly away from the prying eyes of the Attenboroughian neutral observer).DrivingComing back to daylight affairs, the road network in Norway leaves a lot to be desired, and the country has but one motorway that I consider worthy of the name, from Oslo along the west side of the Oslofjord towards Kristiansand. The road network includes several A-roads, but generally speaking, Norwegians often fly domestically. It is difficult to keep a country with geography of Norway connected by overland transport. Additionally, Norwegians drive extremely passively and defensively, and quite slow, to someone from Croatia. This is one of the reasons I don't really enjoy the thought of having to eventually buy a car and drive here (at the very latest, if and when I start a family, if I will still be living here) -- I think I'd have real problems with being constantly annoyed over how slow and passively the traffic moves over here. It's similar to California, how I remember it while I was living there. So for Americans reading this, I guess not too different from home, but for Italians, Spaniards, maybe the French (?) and people from the Balkans, this is an excruciatingly bland and passive, almost boring experience. And I fear that I might not be able to refrain from committing misdemeanors like speeding or what would be considered "aggressive" driving.Janteloven; Or How We Tore The Neck Off Of The American Dream And Proceeded To Shit Down Its NeckIn general, from my perspective life in Norway is very calm and organized, and Norwegians are quite worry-free, because they have a rich nanny state that takes care of a lot of things for them. One thing that people need to understand when living here is the Janteloven. In Croatia, we actually have, as a remnant of communist times, a similar term, but in Croatia it is (I would daresay, in the particular socioeconomic context, and perceived needs of Croatia to develop into a modern country, rightly so) perceived as an extremely negative, stifling, and limiting ideological term -- Uravnilovka (roughly Equalization). Both terms can be understood with the same positive and negative facets, and there are, to be sure, both of those.On the positive side, like all socialist ideologies, Janteloven provides social homogeneity, corps esprit, sense of community, and a social safety network that removes a lot of existential weltschmertz from the life experience of even the most socially imperiled Norwegians. On the negative side, I will just share one particular image for Uravnilovka that pertains equally well to my experience and perception of Janteloven -- that of a pendulum blade like in Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, or like the circular saws springing from the walls in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. These blades are tuned exquisitely to a certain height that is enforced as a universal standard. If your height happens to exceed that to which the saws / blades are set, you get cut down to size.I would imagine that to Americans with their diametrically opposed idea of the American Dream, this sounds like something out of a story with which the Tea Party scare their children.Ordnung Muss Sein; Or On The Question Of Whether You Need A PMP To Have Fun In A SMART Way; Oh, And Sports, Just So, So Many SportsA funny thing about Norwegians in formal settings, like let's say in a company, is that a lot of the time they insist on everything fun being exquisitely planned, with four-color highlighters, neatly organized lists, and arranged seating. It is almost as the idea of the ancient and mystical art of "just shooting the shit out on the patio" is wholly unknown to them. They want to know when we are going, where we are going, how we are getting there, what's the plan B, what do we need to buy before we get there, of course, most important of all, HOW DO WE SPLIT THE BIL.L, before they will even consider doing something fun. And by that, they always mean some kind of organized activity. You cannot just go have something to eat and some drinks. Or you know, god forbid, talk, tell jokes, flirt, and tell stories. There has to be something participatory to do for the organization. Some kind of team-building bullshit. How we build teams in Croatia? Step 1) Lots of food. Step 2) Mountains of booze. Step 3) Maybe some drugs. Step 4) It is in fact not the case that Ana from Accounting must look much worse without all the makeup in the morning. But I'm still not seeing clear from all the booze anyway.The obsession with planned activities reminds me of American summer camps or kindergarten groups.There is one thing that Norwegians are super-passionate about, though, and that is sports. They are an amazingly good-looking, fit, and healthy nation and I have to tip the hat to them for that. But the amount of preoccupation with sports is too damn high, quoth the memetastic Jimmy McMillan. They are crazy about sports, especially the Nordic skiing disciplines, but extending to jogging, cycling, gym, crossfit, everything. If you don't do sports, you are dangerously close to being considered a pariah. And, like the joke about the Vegan, the Cross-fitter, and the Anti-GMO guy, they will tell you about it.Closing Arguments And VerdictIf I wanted to be uncharitable, I'd be inclined to describe the less appetizing facets of Norwegian society and Norway as:They are hidebound. A lot of them do exactly the same thing as the neighbor, and do the popular thing, and do it at the exactly prescribed time of the year, with exactly prescribed gear, having the exactly prescribed opinions on how great whatever they are doing, is.They are spoiled. They have an excellent, rational, social, rich, and high-functioning nation-state that provides, and often don't know how good they are having it, and are prone to First-World-Problemism. In this, they manage to walk the fine line of doublethink wherein they are at the same time extremely liberal and progressive in theory, and quite xenophobic and bigoted in practice.They are unambitious. Their approach to work, while practical and honest, is quite laissez-faire and lackadaisical. Come friday 2 pm, nobody's around to answer phones and emails, and everyone's halfway across the first hill to their cabin.If, on the other hand, I wanted to be charitable, I'd cover exactly the same bases as the above like this, claiming of Norwegians that:They are socially cohesive. They value the same things, understand each other well, are neighborly, and raise children with a high participation of the entire society. They find strength, courage, and beauty in adhering to tradition and unanimity.They are calm, rational, and practical. Their excellent, rational, social, rich, and high-functioning nation-state is an excellent example of how a nation state should be set up. Seeing as how they have their cake and continue to eat it to, at least while the oil still flows, they for the love of all that is holy cannot understand why Rwandans, Somalis, Ex-Yugoslavs, or Russians would choose to operate differently.They realize what is really valuable in life and that you work to live, and not the other way around. They travel on holidays across half the world, are home a lot to spend time with their families, are healthy and content due to sports and spending time in nature, and suffer low levels of work-related stress.All people are people, and there's beautiful, ugly, or boring people everywhere. Croatians are not the rose-petal-smelling pearly ass-farts of rainbow-regurgitating unicorns either, but the question was not about Croatians anyway. For an excellent overview of Croatian idiosyncrasies, I urge everyone to read the excellent Croatian son-in-law, Cody Brown's blog Zablogreb, or more recently, his collected columns on the Voice of Croatia.