Joule's apparatus for measuring the mechanical equivalent of heat energy. A descending weight attached to a string causes a paddle immersed in water to rotate. Caption by Wikipedia, 6 May 2014.
No energy? No matter!
Zero, zip, nada, none: that's how much is left after you turn matter into energy, via a bomb or a power station. But what kind of power station is best? It's actually impossible to say.
I’ve heard that coal-fired power stations are dirty, wind-farms are ugly, and nuclear power stations are dangerous (but much more efficient at producing energy).
Do you agree? I don’t, and I’ll provide the supporting logic in a minute. But first let’s unpack the conventional wisdom and hold it up to the light until it withers and dies!
Power stations are designed to transform matter into energy, or one form of energy into another. If you’ve got nothing better to do, you can use Einstein’s equation, E=MC2, to work out the energy equivalent of the mass1 of any given chunk of matter. The equation says that energy (E) equals mass (M) multiplied by the speed of light (C) squared.
I’ve heard that the reason why you get so much energy via nuclear processes2 is that the speed of light (squared) is such a big number. Really?
His name was Godfrey. His prison nickname was “Goat”. He yearned for a normal life, but had never Toad the line for long enough to settle down.
He’d been arrested on a Poultry charge of Storking, which would have meant a non-custodial sentence had he not been caught Badgering a witness. Six months into his jail-time, Goat had taken the opportunity to escape. Since then he’d been on the Lamb, Pigs Dogging his every move.
It was raining heavily as Goat made his way to where his girlfriend Gwyneth lived. He knocked on the door. No response. Standing in the rain, he knocked again. Still nothing. He smelled a Rat. It was all very Fishy but what choice did he have?
Goat shouted himself Horse. Finally, the door opened.
Come in out of the Reindeer,” said Gwyneth.
“Hey Gwin, what kept ya?” said Goat, “I was starting to suspect Fowl play.”
“How do I become enlightened?” asked the Seeker of his aged guru — a nut-brown, gnarled and wizened personage of indeterminate gender.
Sitting in padmasana on a large boulder on top of a high mountain, at first the Gnarly One treated the question with the stupefied silence it deserved. But the Seeker persisted, much to the Guru’s disgust and annoyance. Still the Nut-brown made no answer.
Still the Seeker persisted, until the Guru’s patience and forbearance evaporated, and ze quoth unto the Seeker, saying “if you want to know how to become enlightened, leave now, and address your question to each of the next five people you meet, from this moment on, henceforth to be precise.”
Dissatisfied and mumbling imprecations under his breath, the Seeker took leave of the Guru and made his stumbling way down the mountain.
At the foot of the mountain, he set his feet toward the dwelling place of his aged parents. On his way he came across an old woman sitting in the shade of a cinnabar tree.
“How do I become enlightened?” the Seeker asked, without even so much as a how-do-you-do.
“Get lost asshole!” replied the old woman. Which is what the Seeker proceeded to do — he chose a path along which he had never previously travelled, and after some time wandering through the foothills, became absolutely, totally, horribly lost.
The next person he met was a short and rather chubby man, with a twinkle in his eye and mischief in his heart. The twinkling man was sitting on a blanket in the middle of which was a large picnic basket. Behind the twinkler was a fork in the road and a signpost with two signs posted.
There are no disagreements, there is only confusion about labels. There are no arguments about meaning, there is only a failure to understand the difference between the signified and the signifier. This confusion is especially relevant and important in relation to so-called disagreements about god or gods, and the nature and meaning thereof.
Both the pantheistic position and the panentheistic position are unassailable, logically, because they are constructed on the bedrock of axiomatic definition, and the truth of any axiom is as agreed in advance of its application. (Although if Godel is right then all positions are unassailable from within but may be assailable from without).
The Scottish war-chief McMac and his war-bud Lord Mildew were heading home after a long, hard day of slaughter and mayhem.
Behind them was the whiskey-soaked battlefield upon which their foul-breathed minions had totally vomited upon the enemy — the cowardly, beef-eating English — had thrown them crying into their warm beer back to their moustachioed mothers and pink-cheeked fathers.
Mounted upon their champing war-nags, bollocks bruised and battered, the noble haggis-lovers clip-clopped their weary way up and down a lonely stretch of heather-cursed witch-land, as mountainous and boring as this very tale itself.
The presenter's voice was low and slow, the soporific drone permeating what remained of Anne's caffeine-deprived consciousness. In the grip of full-blown doodlemania, her glassy eyes stared into her notebook as her pen moved randomly across the page.
Interminable, the presenter's so-called words surged languidly through her skull-case into her soggy brain, the toxic monotony eroding her fragile consciousness:
"...committed to sustainably focus on debottlenecking our key deliverables, empowering and incentivizing optimal customer-facing engagement," continued the presenter, relentless and unrelenting as a tidal bore.
God don't some people just love the sound of their own voice, thought Anne to herself. Death by a thousand powerpoints... but only ninety minutes to go, unless some jerkwad asks a question, which is pretty much guaranteed... The realization multiplied her despair exponentially.
"...and given our objective to leverage stakeholder core competencies, our imperatives encompass picking the low-hanging fruit as key to implementing the new paradigm embedded in our mission-critical strategic tactics," the presenter paused. An almost imperceptible frown crossed his brow as his eyes swept the room.
"And externalising supplier desilofication will mean eating our own dogfood from the get-go," he said, "but that's enough from me. Anne, your thoughts?"
Startled into wakefulness, she looked up from her notebook.
"Uh... that's a no-brainer..." she stammered, praying for more words to come.
Then the solutionization of her predicament arrived. The fire drill alarm brought the meeting to a close.
NIGHTMERRIES: THE LIGHTER SIDE OF DARKNESS This so-called "book" will chew you up, spit you out, and leave you twitching and frothing on the carpet. More than 60 dark and feculent fictions (read ‘em and weep) copiously illustrated by over 20 grotesque images you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.
AWAREWOLF & OTHER CRHYMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Vot could be Verse?) We all hate poetry, right? But we might make an exception for this sick and twisted stuff. This devil's banquet of adults-only offal features more than 50 satanic sonnets, vitriolic verses and odious odes.
MANIC MEMES & OTHER MINDSPACE INVADERS A disturbing repository of quotably quirky quotes, sayings, proverbs, maxims, ponderances, adages and aphorisms. This menagerie holds no fewer than 184 memes from eight meme-species perfectly adapted to their respective environments.
FIENDS & FREAKS Adults-only Tales of Serpents, Dragons, Devils, Lobsters, Anguished Spirits, Gods, Anti-gods and Other Horse-thieves You Wouldn't Want to Meet in a Dark Kosmos: 4th Edition
HAGS TO HAGGIS Whiskey-soaked Tails of War-nags, Witches, Manticores and Escapegoats, Debottlenecking and Desilofication, Illustrated
Joule's apparatus for measuring the mechanical equivalent of heat energy. A descending weight attached to a string causes a paddle immersed in water to rotate. Caption by Wikipedia, 6 May 2014.
There are no disagreements, there is only confusion about labels. There are no arguments about meaning, there is only a failure to understand the difference between the 