The Other Hand

I was born right handed. However, due to the rigors of repetitive stress injury over the years, I've become left handed.

My right brain controls my left hand, so it gets kind of mean sometimes. It is not happy about being the "main hand". I still eat right handed, throw balls right handed, all that stuff. But I must use a keyboard and mouse in a left handed way. After a while it rebels, and makes stupid mistakes -- which usually means my right hand must now hit dozens of backspaces.

Such an asshole, my left hand. I've come to distrust everyone's left hands.

Energy For Beer

No of course not - you cannot get energy from beer, beyond the psychological effects of drinking it. You can throw a lit match into it and just pfffts the flame out. You can put wires in it an it just sits there. If you pass a current through it, not exactly recommended, it just bubbles a little bit. It acts more like a resistor than anything that adds energy.

No, the energy is FOR the beer, not the other way around. Beer is not easily replaced by any other stuff. Wine is just not the same. Whiskey is definitely too much. You can't just chug mugs of tequila like you can chug mugs of beer. The Egyptians knew the importance of beer.

(Hmmm. I don't really like beer, or any alcoholic beverage.) But there are definite beer enthusiasts out there, entire football stadiums full. There are sports bars and pizza bars and barbecues and backyard cookouts, all with their favorite brews and some with their own breweries. But to make beer, you gotta have energy.

Certainly everyone knows about 60 cycle hum. This is the familiar hum of everyday house electricity in America. Light bulbs are all blinking 60 times per second. There are coils of wire that are being reversed in magnetic field polarity 60 times per second. One only need to produce very small balls that vibrate 60 times per second to produce energy. The balls will become slightly warmer. One can make many tiny pendulums that tick their 60 cycle ticks and produce a machine that perpetually runs, so long as the 60 cycle hum exists.

I shall name the resulting brew "HUMS Beer" -- from the land of 60 hertz.

Sliding Into Oblivion

One thing that really bothers me is that the bees are dying. I've read several articles about it, watched a BBC TV news bit about it, and I've read some of the scientific magazines blurbs about it.

Since writing this I have learned that a kind of parasitic bacteria is responsible for the plight of bees. Also, the likelihood that they will survive as a species is at least as high as ever.

It also bothers me that although large percentages of the bees are dying in large areas of the Earth, that nobody has a good theory why.

Although I am as likely to blame global warming (or climate change, if you prefer), but I don't think that is the sole reason, but may be something that worsens an already existing problem.

Diseases have been tested for, and only small numbers of the bee deaths can be linked to any specific disease. Likewise with mites, which are a problem, but not so much to account for all the deaths.

There is a clue -- that bees go out of the hive to forage for food and do their pollen thing, but don't come back. Slowly the hive is less and less populated until it is unable to provide for the next generation. Perhaps the hive limps along but it is not productive, and the fields are left unpollinated.

Could it be that simultaneously, all over the world, that there is a bee assassin growing in the weeds? Some kinds of poisonous spiders or an increase in bee eating lizards. But usually things like that are limited to a specific region, and would be obvious for their effects on other animals than just bees.

Are ants dying also? Are there other insects that have similar habits as bees that suffer the same fate? I wish I knew. It is an interesting problem, but I am not equipped to go out in the fields and solve it. Besides, there are highly competant beekeepers and scientists already trying to figure it out.