Post by maddoctord on Aug 27, 2008 11:49:37 GMT -5
Hahahahaha!
Good one Cal. I know where my towel is too.
For those of you guys who do not get it, it comes from the phrase, "A hoopy frood always knows where his towel is".
This aphorism was created by the late-great Douglas Adams, who had spoke of the importance of the towel in his book series, "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (One of my favorites, by the way).
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
But yeah, the problem with a lot of the energies that are supposed to be renewable is the fact that they are only usable in very specific locations. Hydro-electricity can only be used around specific fast flowing river, and that disrupts the "delecate ecosystems" that the environmentalists are so determined to protect.
Geothermal is good, but it's the rarest kind since you can only use it around large lava-pools close to the surface, as Cal said. This means that there are very few places that can actually benefit from this: IE - Yellowstone National Park, Hawaii, Iceland.
Solar power only works in really dry climates that don't get much rain, and not just that, but they can be pretty expensive to maintain. These sorts of places are Arizona, Sahara, and a few others. Alaska isn't part of this because the panels are to spin a turbine to create steam. And it gets pretty cold up there even though during the summers, the days are ridiculously long.
Lastly, there's wind. Noisy, kills birds, disrupts electronic communication. Large isolated areas are necessary when these turbines are spun. Really unstable areas that have constantly changing atmospheric pressures, because wind is nothing more than the sweeping of atmospheric pressure transferring from high pressure areas to low, and this doesn't happen just everywhere. Windmills need it consistently.
But really. There are many, many, many places that do not have these kinds of resources. So what does that leave the rest of us with? So-called, "Fossil fuels". Apparently the absolute gung-ho people ignore the fact stated above. But we can't have that because it's bad.
The only truly renewable resource is being completely ignored, and not being addressed at all. Gravity and Magnetism. There isn't enough resources for advocation of this, and the only modern guy who completely understood it and did something with it is is long dead... (Aside from Cal that I know of)
Good one Cal. I know where my towel is too.
For those of you guys who do not get it, it comes from the phrase, "A hoopy frood always knows where his towel is".
This aphorism was created by the late-great Douglas Adams, who had spoke of the importance of the towel in his book series, "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (One of my favorites, by the way).
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
But yeah, the problem with a lot of the energies that are supposed to be renewable is the fact that they are only usable in very specific locations. Hydro-electricity can only be used around specific fast flowing river, and that disrupts the "delecate ecosystems" that the environmentalists are so determined to protect.
Geothermal is good, but it's the rarest kind since you can only use it around large lava-pools close to the surface, as Cal said. This means that there are very few places that can actually benefit from this: IE - Yellowstone National Park, Hawaii, Iceland.
Solar power only works in really dry climates that don't get much rain, and not just that, but they can be pretty expensive to maintain. These sorts of places are Arizona, Sahara, and a few others. Alaska isn't part of this because the panels are to spin a turbine to create steam. And it gets pretty cold up there even though during the summers, the days are ridiculously long.
Lastly, there's wind. Noisy, kills birds, disrupts electronic communication. Large isolated areas are necessary when these turbines are spun. Really unstable areas that have constantly changing atmospheric pressures, because wind is nothing more than the sweeping of atmospheric pressure transferring from high pressure areas to low, and this doesn't happen just everywhere. Windmills need it consistently.
But really. There are many, many, many places that do not have these kinds of resources. So what does that leave the rest of us with? So-called, "Fossil fuels". Apparently the absolute gung-ho people ignore the fact stated above. But we can't have that because it's bad.
The only truly renewable resource is being completely ignored, and not being addressed at all. Gravity and Magnetism. There isn't enough resources for advocation of this, and the only modern guy who completely understood it and did something with it is is long dead... (Aside from Cal that I know of)
