How I Almost Won a Nobel Prize

I believe I have invented something like superconductivity at room temperature.

For decades, scientists have known that some materials, cooled to something near absolute zero (0 °K, or -273 °C) provide no resistance to a current. It has to do with the pairing of electrons, or turnips or something, at that temperature. If left undisturbed, a current at extremely low temperature will go on just about forever. There is no resistance.

Our home here i the Twin Cities has a lawn that completely encircles the house. It is a corner lot, which means that, on two sides, our yard abuts neighbors; upwind neighbors. Not just upwind: up dandelion-wind!

They are principled neighbors. One refuses to use chemicals unless they taste good, or the doctor prescribes them, and the other refuses to spray anything that can be mowed down, regularly, every month, usually.

Because we have planted wildflowers, I have to be careful about weed killers, since wildflowers are weeds, so I attack the dandelions with a hand tool.

I have discovered this: if I start at the front yard, clipping dandelion roots down deep, and work my way all around the yard, back to the front, again, there will be precisely as many dandelions smiling at me as when I began.

It goes on forever! From here until eternity, I can keep going around the house, nothing impeding me, nothing slowing down or speeding up, as happy as an angel singing, "I'll be a sunbeam for Jesus", forever. At room temperature!

It is a definition of eternity! Of ineffability!

I would take time off to nominate myself for a Nobel Prize, but that would upset the equilibrium, and nobody ever got a Nobel Prize for losing to dandelions.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

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