Chapter 1The ice storm encased the branches with a thick layer of ice that weighed them down. Branches thatnormally would reach for the sky bowed to the ground like the head of a depressed teenager who'sdiscovered just how stupid adults are and just how pointless life is. Some of the trees fell. This one treegave in not so much because of the ice--the ice was the final blow--but to say that the ice caused thetree to fall would be to ignore how infested it was with lichens. Some lichens contain olivetal whichalong with pulegone from pennyroyal can make a material resembling THC even more potent then theactive ingredient in marijuana. I know this because Michael told me to look it up.For reasons no one can remember, power lines are hung above ground between wooden polls. Theinitial cost of burring the wires was higher then the cost hanging them above ground on polls. Largely people fix their logic around what they like. When all the facts were in about where to put the power lines, all of the facts against burring them had come in long enough ago for the people who ordered thestudies to triumphantly say that they were right all along in wanting to hang the power lines aboveground. That the initial cost was lower was seen as the final reason to push head with above ground power lines.People love trees. They are woody. Trees on the other hand make a nice image of evolution in action.Michael was always going on about evolution. He said it was the greatest idea that ever had been or ever will be conceived. Every branch on the tree is a surviver, every branch on the ground is not. If youcould sit in front of a sapling and watch it grow speeding up time so you don't get bored or slowingdown your mind for the same reason, you would see. Trees do almost all their growing at the tips of the branches. Branches get thicker because the outer layer is the only part that is alive and growing. Theinside is for the most part dead, just like people.Some branches are weaker then others, some are just unlucky. The laws of probability say that althoughyou would have a hard time saying which branch will brake next, on average the weaker branches willfall more often and that on average more strong branches will stay on the tree. I like to sit in front of trees and look at the scares left by the fallen branches and try to construct a time laps movie in my headof the life of that tree. It's really cool how fast things fall when you speed time up a hundred milliontimes to fit a 50 year old tree into my fifteen second attention span. I've had to adjust quite a few of the physical constants to get the branches to fall so quickly without smashing into the ground at relativisticspeeds. Sometimes when fifteen seconds seems to long, I imagine and the branches fall with such forcethey create a stable black hole that falls straight to the center of the earth while pulling the entire planetinto itself. I've destroyed may simulated worlds in trying to get this right.You only need one wire from the power plant to transmit electricity. The return path of the circuit iscompleted through the earth. Using a multimeter you can prove to yourself by sticking the probes into awall socket that ground wire and the neutral wire are actually connected before they get to the socket.They do this so that any power built up in a device has twice the ability to expel energy as it does todraw energy. This makes it twice as hard to design a properly grounded device that will send enoughcurrent through the house's wiring to cause a fire before the circuit breaker between the hot terminaland the power company trips. But Michael has faith in you.When a branch sags onto the power lines it competes the circuit to the ground, electricity flows, sparksfly, and here in the US, the hum of sixty hertz can be heard. If the tree makes a good enough connectionto the ground then a transformer will blow. Transformers are those silver canisters you see on some power lines.
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