This week I worked most of three days trying to remove air-conditioner components from my 1996 Mercury Villager minivan -- and wishing for two tools that might be handy in a car repair shop.
1) Fixed wrench lever. To turn a stuck nut or bolt crowded by neighboring structures. The tool would hold a small eye wrench or C wrench firmly at any desired angle and provide mechanical advantage.
2) Shear on a stick. To cut hoses crowded by neighboring structures. This would have a hook and blade like a rose clipper at the end of a shaft, the blade forced into the hook by sliding motion rather than scissor motion. The forcing of blade into hook would come from repeated gripping of a handle at the opposite end.
Here's some idle speculation.
* When I was young, the only known cosmic force was gravity. It attracted matter to matter; and I speculated that it would eventually attract all matter in the universe to a spot in the middle.
* In recent decades, galaxies were found to be distributed quite unevenly in the universe, tending to form a 3-D web or network of galaxy-rich strings with large voids between. The distribution of galaxies is like the trabeculae of a sponge. The scaffolding for this galaxy distribution does not emit, absorb or reflect light so it is called dark matter, but it does bend light by gravitational lensing.
* Not long ago, astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter compared supernova brightness (inverse distance) with supernova red shift (departure speed) and concluded that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate (by a logic that I have failed to follow). Dark energy was postulated as the force accelerating galaxies apart. It is said to arise from empty space and to become an ever growing fraction of cosmological force as space between galaxies increases.
* Dark energy is said to constitute 70% of the mass of the universe, dark matter is said to be 25% of the mass of the universe, and regular old visible matter is said to be only 5% of the mass of the universe. That’s three kinds of mass and three kinds of mass-dependent force.
* Could it be that the observable universe is surrounded by a dense shell of matter and energy that departed first in the big bang and is attracting distant parts of the observable universe radially by ordinary gravity, thereby accounting for the relation between distance and rate of departure? If so, dark energy needn’t be postulated.
* On the other hand, could it be that classic gravity is an illusion, that dark energy does it all? Could dark energy account for all mass-dependent forces by exerting an isotropic repulsion everywhere from beyond and within the observable universe? Could accelerations attributed to classical gravity result from shading of this repulsion by masses in the paths?
* This last speculation may be compatible with others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEIC42qDrqk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSTH1o03dfU
In fact, it is a very old idea from about 1700.
* About 1 in 10 adult Americans have psychiatric disorders involving delusions, obsessions, depressions, fears, anxieties, etc. Many more harbor irrational beliefs about racial, national, political and religious groups and about cause-effect relations. Many enjoy cruelty.
* The vast majority of Americans can get their hands on firearms within a few days of trying. Thus, the probability of a massacre in any month is substantial.
* In light of these facts, our society would seem justified in outlawing large clips and magazines, which greatly advantage anyone with an appetite for massacre – regardless of the NRA’s interpretation of the second amendment.
* What are the contrary arguments?
