LINCOLN HIGHWAY (AMOR TOWLES) AND THE ATTENUATION OF WAVES

 

And this was my favorite rocking chair, said Woolly to no one.

He was standing on the porch, a little while after Duchess had gone to the general store. Giving the chair a push, he listened to the thwapping of its rockers as it rocked back and forth, noting how each individual thwap came closer and closer together as the back and forths became smaller and smaller, until they stopped altogether.

The loss of energy due to friction processes makes the amplitud of the oscillation of the rocking chair lesser and lesser. It´s like a tennis ball released from high. The ball is loosing height until stopping on the floor. With friction forces acting, the mechanical energy is being lost. When the armonic motion moves into the space, this is why the wave intensuty become lower when get away from focus

How many readers have read the whole paragraph? As it were a wave, the number of readers have been decreasing while I was inserting technical terms.

 

THE GIRAFFE'S NECK (JUDITH SCHALANSKY) AND THE HETEROTROPHIC NATURE OF HUMAN BEINGS

 Plants turned energy-poor materials into energy-rich. Animals did the reverse. We just weren’t autotrophic. Day after day, in every little leaf, in every tiny chloroplast, the miracle that kept us all alive occurred. Epidermis, cuticle, spongy mesophyll. If you were green you wouldn’t have to eat anything, you wouldn’t have to go shopping, you wouldn’t have to work. You wouldn’t have to do anything at all. You would just have to lie in the sun for a bit, drink some water, absorb carbon dioxide, and everything, really everything, would be fine. Chloroplasts beneath the skin. It would be ­wonderful!

 

I couldn´t disagree more about the author´s thesis. I don´t want chloroplasts under my skin and that wouldn´t be wonderful. When you say ´plant life´, there´s rightly a negative connotation. I say hurrah for heterotrophic organisms with their pleasurable activities!

Nevertheless, it has been written and fantasized about this for years. There´s another novel, Solar by Ian McEwan, with no exactly the same plot, but with a kind of MacGuffin about something similar.