tsujigiri

The editorial comments of Chris and James, covering the news, science, religion, politics and culture.

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." -Douglas Adams

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Westboro Baptist nears elimination of all gayness.

Just for a lark, I thought I'd check out the good ol' folks over at Westboro Baptist and see what they've been up to lately. They haven't slowed down a bit! In fact, I can't help but wonder if they've been taken over by satirists. Check out their schedule of upcoming events:

  • WBC to picket the hypocritical farce calling itself the Greater Lawrence Christian Men's Association Spring Breakfast - 7:30 a.m., Sat. May 14 - at the sodomite whorehouse masquerading as Corpus Christi Catholic Church, 6001 Bob Billings Parkway, Lawrence
  • WBC to celebrate the 161st Anniversary of Whoremonger Joseph Smith's entry into Hell June 27, 1844, by picketing the Mormon Morons Traveling Sodomite Dance Troop aka Brigham Young University-Idaho's Dance Alliance - 7:30 p.m. Fri. May 20 at Washburn Fag U's White Concert Hall
  • WBC to picket the filthy dyke Methodist preacher - Irene Stroud - at Memorial United Methodist Church, 250 Bryant Ave., White Plains, N.Y., on Sunday, May 22 at 10 a.m.; and, at First Methodist Church of Germantown, 6023 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, Penn., on Sunday, May 29 at 10 a.m.; and, at filthy dyke 'partner' Chris Paige's sodomite whorehouse masquerading as Tabernacle United Church, 3700 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, on Sunday, May 29 at 11 a.m.

I've never heard anyone express such loathing for the BYU dance apparatus. I'm also quite curious about this farce that calls itself a "spring breakfast." Since its in Corpus Christi, in close proximity to Mexico, I'm envisioning huevos rancheros might be on the menu. Damn that filthy, tasty breakfast.

Money is energy, d$/dt is power.

I was thinking today about Star Trek, money, communism, and the phrase "money is power." In the future Trek universe, they supposedly don't use money. But they must use some unit of exchange to mediate the supply and demand for raw resources. And even in the Trek world, people clearly own things ranging from trombones to space ships. A Soviet-style centralized approach is probably mal-adaptive even in the future, so there must be some mode of exchange for goods services.

So I thought, what unit of exchange would these future people use? The answer seemed immediately obvious: Joules. Conservation of energy is the one universal limitation on wealth. Energy is literally a measure of work and is therefore closely tied to value. I'm sure economists have always been aware of this, but it seemed like a surprising realization to me. There must be some proportionality between real energy (in Joules) and the value of the dollar.

As an almost trivial example, I buy 11.25 kWh (40.5 MJ) of electrical energy for $1. I might there for say that a dollar is worth approximately 40.5MJ, which is really a hell of a lot of energy. Through mechanical labor alone, I would have to push a cart containing 100kg of stuff over 405km to earn a single damn dollar. At the other end of the spectrum, Bill Gates is currently worth about $29G, or 1.1745e+18 J. This is enough energy to shift the Moon's orbit by about 15um, which is quite a lot for a man whose own mass is 21 orders of magnitude smaller than that of the Moon.

Now on to the phrase "money is power." Actually, power is the rate of spending. Every dollar I spend per day is roughly 470W of power. The average human body consumes about 100W of power. The human brain, that mighty seat of the soul, knowledge and wisdom, consumes about 23W of power. Damn, do we use a lot of energy.

As an aside, the United States alone consumes over 22 million barrels of oil per day. There are 6.17MJ in a barrel of oil. There are about 300 million people in the US. That works out to an average of 452kJ of oil per person per day, which you might say is an average consumption of 5.3kW of oil per person. Dayum.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

JesusCom

All must hear these delightful recorded conversations with a "Christian-based telephone service provider."

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Speaking of table-top fusion...

I just wanted to make sure no one missed the successful UCLA fusion experiment.