Published

2 years ago

February 2, 2024

Alice Rush

As we get into the later years of our lives, after we’ve lost a parent (or both) and more than a few school chums, we start to consider, perhaps for the first time, our own mortality.

Dylan Thomas is best remembered for his poem that begins: Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

As shown at left, however, the Stoics had a far different, and, I would suggest, healthier approach to that event that ultimately confronts all of us.

Their Latin saying, Memento mori, “remember that you [have to] die’, may sound equally macabre, but it carries the same life affirming concept as does “Carpe diem.” Make every moment count, toward whatever you wish to achieve for yourself, and/or for those around you.

Approaches to Death

Related Topics:Dylan Thomas later years mortality

Up Next

Americans’ Eroding Respect for Higher Education

Don't Miss

The Liquid Wind project, Finland Overview

Alice Rush

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

18 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.