Book of Distributed Power and Tom Waits

This piece of writing includes a spoiler in the first paragraph, although if you have read the book “Legacies” it is irrelevant and if you haven’t it is still worth reading.

I am currently reading what I believe is the first Repairman Jack novel and the second “Adversary Cycle” novel by F Paul Wilson. They are the same book “The Tomb” , and that got me thinking of what is the second Repairman Jack novel (not part of the “Adversary Cycle” ) “Legacies” which deals with the concept of distributed power.

Distributed power would enable us to power things over the whatever waves, the same way as we do with television , radio , mobile phones and wifi except doing things with power. I still don’t really understand how we can transfer music or video in the form of wifi or radio signals to a device and it succeeds. As you transfer whatever space is taken up on the device , so whatever is filling up that space must come from somewhere but we cannot see it.

We know it comes from somewhere and it goes somewhere and when it’s delivered we can use it , so the concept works , but I really don’t know how.

The nearest I am aware of to distributed power are the pads that you can buy to charge enabled devices to charge without plugging in. I suppose we could get worried if the waves were full of electricity variants, getting us scared of being fried like the claims against 5G mobile phone signals.

Imagine a world where everything worked in that way , you wouldn’t need to fill up a car or charge a phone or computer. You wouldn’t have to pug anything in. As I type this I am listening to “Small Change” by Tom Waits , the CD player is plugged into a socket and takes power from the wiring in my house.

Imagine no wiring and no plugs , power always available and always on. That’s how we think of our utilities. We expect our water to flow, our lights to come on when we flick the switch , our phone to work when we want to make a call, but we still generally have to plug things in or fill them up to actually use them.

Taking this further, imagine a self filling kettle or meals ready on demand , how convenient would that world be. Would we use the extra time to improve ourselves or would we just watch television and drink beer and wine?

The things we do in life do take effort and time , but I feel if I didn’t have to plug things in and charge my phone or fill up a car, my life would be a lot simpler and allow me to do more and improve myself even more.

So that’s essentially what I wanted to say in this piece and it woul dbe interesting to find out if people have any other examples of distributed power type scenarios and also reasons why we couldn’t have that at our fingertips.

Again listening to Tom Waits’ “Small Change” which seems to be straying into “American Gothic” territory on many songs. His voice and delivery is unmistakable and I am impressed with how his persona progresses and changes over his albums sequence. I was very impressed with the “Under The Influence” documentary on Amazon Prime and am enjoying revisiting his first five albums in the Asylum box set.

The opening song on “Small Change” is “Tom Traubert’s Blues” was covered by Rod Stewart and the opener on his debut album “Closing Time” “Ol’ 55” was covered by The Eagles so while his vocal style may not appeal to most tastes , mainstream artists can see how good the songs of Tom Waits are.