#trumpstupid | #WhatTheyVotedFor
There comes a point at which it seems the most straightforward explanation seems, quite simply, that Donald Trump does not understand how much trouble he cannot get out of.
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Image note: Detail of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner, 12 June 2015.
In the history of ideas … right. It is not so much that there are good ideas and bad ideas; rather, every once in a while the question arises, “What, this is an idea?”
No, no, no. That is not really about the artistic product. Playing with such ideas is part of cartooning, especially in the network century. Given that truth is stranger than fiction, we can expect the cartoonists will never actually catch up, even those who catch on.
There are some ideas that seem so removed from the realm of good ideas that we might wonder whence they rise. That is to say, given the content of the annals of life, the idea that one might try such an approach is, well, yes, it is possible. And, given that this is the twenty-first century, after all, why not? Think of politics. If you do not like the question, make something up. And if someone complains that you did not answer the question, argue that you did. So that if the question is the economics of family and you hear a Republican declare that intra-uterine devices are abortifacients, bear in mind that it is, after all, an answer. What would make anyone think it is a good or even relevant answer has nothing to do with anything.
Divorce humor is one thing. Humor in divorce is quite another. The saddest part is that we can rest assured that something like this has happened before. It has all happened before, and it will all happen again until humanity chooses extinction, which, in turn, is an idea, and with the benefit of being applicable to nearly any question.
Meanwhile, Zach Weiner tries his hand at something having to do with divorce and humor, and considering the history of ideas, the disheartening thing is the realization that while life is not so simple as to be adequately explained in eight frames, neither is it so routine that such a proposition should seem extraordinary.
I’m going to have to become some sort of physicist. Damn. I hate math.
No, actually, I don’t; I’m just a pathetic mathematician. Or, more accurately, not a mathematician at all. But that’s beside the point. Except, damn. I’m going to have to become some sort of physicist.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Some of the questions my brother and I asked thirty years ago probably astounded my father the way my daughter can absolutely befuddle me. “What,” she asked, not too long ago, “is a solar sail?”
Seven, by the way. Now eight.
Of course I told her about this far-flung idea of using a laser to push a spacecraft, and how the vessel could reach speeds near light. You know, stuff from fifteen years ago.
But I had no idea.
A BBC article brings me up to speed with lightfoil, which is a cool word despite the fact that no superhero will ever use it as a name:
Just as air causes lift on the wings of an aeroplane, light can do the same trick, researchers have said.
The effect, first shown in simulations, was proven by showing it in action on tiny glass rods.
Like the aerofoil concept of wings, the approach, published in Nature Photonics, works by making use of the radiation pressure of light.
The results are of interest for steering “solar sails”, a spacecraft propulsion based on the same force.
Each photon – or packet of light – carries its own momentum, and this “lightfoil” works by gathering the momentum of light as it passes through a material.
This radiation pressure has been considered as a fuel-free source of propulsion for long-distance space missions; a “solar sail” gathering up the momentum of the Sun’s rays can get a spacecraft up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.
But until now, no one thought to use the pressure in an analogue of an aerofoil, said Grover Swarzlander of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
B.D.'s Last Refuge 