I just finished another painting this week, All the Visions.

“All the Visions,” oil on canvas, February, 2014, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

The painting is based on a photo taken in 1983, I think I used the timer on my camera and shot it myself. Possibly my photographer friend David Abrams shot it. But I’m guessing that I shot it, as I have the color print.

This has to do with a Kerouac-style novel called All The Visions that I wrote on a single long scroll of paper that year in Lynchburg, Virginia. (The photo shows a warm-up session when I wasn’t yet using the scroll). You can’t see the UFO in the photo, but it’s clear in the painting. I plan to reissue All The Visions via Transreal Books later in 2014 — it appeared from a small press, Ocean View Books, in 1991. I still have that rose red IBM Selectric typewriter in my basement. The acme of modern writing equipment in 1983. I wrote a lot of books on that thing.

Otherwise I’m just hanging out, doing some work on a revision of All the Visions, also starting up on an SF story having to do with an extremely powerful laser. I’m thinking its power is at the yottawatt level.

I like these sequences of power prefixes, Kilowatt —> Megawatt —> Petawatt —> Exawatt —> Zettawatt —> Yottawatt. There’s a Wikipedia page explaining it.

Our Sun’s luminosity is 385 yottawatts. But we don’t get the full benefit of all this light. Earth gets a steady illumination of about 174 petawatts from the Sun. How much does sunlight cost? How much would it cost to keep the light on? Well, a kilowatt-hour costs 12 cents. Call it 10 cents. Sun gives us about 170 petawatts. So an hour of that is 170 trillion kilowatt hours. So sunlight cost is 12 cents * 170 trillion per hour, which is about 20 trillion dollars per hour. Average that out over 7 billion people. About $3000 dollars per hour per person. Call it two million a month. “The power bill’s here!”

I’m glad that it’s raining today. All this weather for free. And that amazing yottawatt sun driving the whole thing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 8th, 2014 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.