I have a routine of listening to podcasts during any mealtime, so that I'm constantly immersed in a flow of new ideas. I can chow down on information while refueling my body. Howstuffworks.com publishes several podcasts that explain, of course, how stuff works and feeds my appetite for knowledge. SALT / Seminars About Long-term Thinking from longnow.org flavors my outlook with a longer term perspective. Cspan's BookTV / After Words is usually too political for my tastes but still makes it to my list whenever they manage to teach me something about a system in the world that I haven't heard about. Skeptics Guide to the Universe has a quiz that I always look forwards to. Radiolab has taken storytelling and science reporting to a new level. It's like listening to a radio drama from the golden age of radio, but in MP3 format and about science stories. New York Academy of Sciences is full of interviews with compelling stories about research, and they've just started a series on the Seven Deadly Sins.
Recently, a SALT podcast from a few years back gave a history of fusion power and its somewhat tarnished history. Sure, we won't be seeing palladium-based cold fusion reactors anytime soon, but there is enough interest and funding to fuel legitimate research. The newest approach is inertial confinement, where fusible hydrogen isotopes are held in a tiny pellet and hit with focusing laser beams. When the lasers hit the outside of the pellet, the outer layer heats up and implodes towards the center. The high temperature and pressure are enough to replicate the conditions found in stars, and coax some of the nuclei towards fusion.
So where is the inertia in this inertial confinement system? It's because the pellet is sitting there. It has inertia. The gas doesn't move anywhere until something acts upon it, like, say, hugely powerful laser beams.
And then its time for bed. All of this is sitting somewhere in the inbox of my brain before I fall asleep.
I dream.
Someone is showing me a hair clipper. They aren't speaking, they're just holding out this hair clipper that they want me to use.
“Here, trim your hair.” They seem to broadcast towards me from nowhere.
“How? This thing doesn't look like the one I'm used to.”
“Just turn it on.”
“OK. But how are the blades going to shear if they aren't attached to anything? Won't they just flop around in space and drift apart?”
I'm trying to point out the weird configuration of the blades at the end of the trimmer. A normal hair trimmer would have two serrated blades, one fixed to the handle and the other shearing back and forth to trim hairs. This one has two blades, but they're arranged differently than what I'm used to seeing. Instead of having one blade firmly attached to the handle, it's on a rubbery extension that pushes out into space. It can move back and forth, like the cap on a springy door-stop or the tip of a fishing rod. The other blade is on another metal rod and attached to the vibrating mechanism in the handle.
“Here. Turn it on. It works.” They suggest again.
“OK.”
I turn on the hair trimmer, and it seem to work. Since one blade is on a rubbery extension, its inertia keeps it in place relatively still while the other blade reciprocates next to it. The flexible extension prevents the blades from being pressed too hardly into the skin.
I wake up.
What was that all about? It takes a while, but later in the day I imagine that the ideas from the fusion experiments had found their way into a new design for a hair trimmer. I guess this is the meaning I can take from the dream, or that I need to shave.