"The Poet, the Lunatic, and the Lover"

That was the title of a sonnet or something by Shakespeare. If I remember correctly, the gist of it was that all three of them are nuts. He could have included the artist and the philosopher in there too, but he didn't. I know of at least one philosopher (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900) who ended up certifiably insane, and I'm sure there were others that nobody ever caught up with. Representing the artistic community, we have Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890, who cut off one of his ears and mailed it to a lady friend he was trying to impress. He eventually committed suicide, which inspired a really neat song ("Vincent", by Don McLean), so it wasn't a total waste.

The knowledge that we carry around in our brains is cumulative, each new piece has to fit in with the pieces that are already there, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense. Our natural impulse is to reject anything that doesn't fit, I suppose because that's easier than throwing out everything we have already learned and starting over again. With practice, though, we can learn how to make it fit by trimming it up a bit and weaseling it into a crack between two other things. Generally, the first time we hear something new, we're likely to doubt it but, the more times we hear it repeated from different sources, the more we tend to think that that there might be something to it. That's not all bad, but sometimes those different sources are merely quoting each other so, for all practical purposes, it's really only one source. A person needs to watch out for that.

Just because a theory has a few holes in it doesn't necessarily meant that the whole concept is worthless, maybe it just needs a little fine tuning to work the bugs out of it. I looked up dilithium crystals while you were away, and it seems that it is indeed a fictional substance. There is such a thing as lithium, and even dilithium, but neither of them resembles the crystals of Star Trek fame. I also found out that dilithium crystals aren't the power source in the warp core either, they're used as sort of a buffer to enable the controlled use of the matter-antimatter reaction, which is the real power source. So it seems that the warp core has the same problem as nuclear fusion, they can make a weapon of mass destruction out of it, but putting it in a bottle and controlling it is a whole nother story. Is antimatter a real thing, or is it just another pie in the sky theory? How about dark energy? I'll have to look that up too someday, but maybe you already know about it and can save me some time.
I still believe that the idea of stand alone power plants, not connected to any grid, is a good concept, we just need to figure out how to make it work.

My daughter showed me something the other day on her little magic telephone, and I think we can  find it on our regular computers too. It's called "Solar Freaking Roadways". (I'm not making this up.) There was this video, which she said she found on You Tube. The guy doing the narration sounded like he was on speed or something, but that doesn't necessarily mean the whole thing is fraudulent. Come to think of it, I seem to remember seeing something like that on TV awhile back, but I had dismissed it as more pie in the sky. Anyway, this doesn't fit in with my independent power plant concept, but I think it's something worth looking in to. It seems like the cost of installation would be prohibitive. Indeed, they can't afford to put regular paving on the roads in my neighborhood. The guy said it would pay for itself, and it probably will eventually, but we still need to locate a source of funding for the start-up costs. Of course, it doesn't cost anything to think about it and talk about it, which is necessary in the beginning stages anyway.