I like grouping concepts into loose trinities, and I'm talking about two forms of power, hence I also present...Power! She's from Chainsaw Man and she's...visiting the Pnictogen Wing for a while. In fact she's been tearing stuff up here pretty well and uh we're working on it.

At some point I realized that political power and physical power, power in the sense of "physical work over time", were roughly equivalent. One can estimate the power of a human being by gauging how much physical power they can cause to be exerted on their behalf at a command. Consider for example how one can estimate, in fairly straightforward physical terms, how powerful two military leaders are in comparison to each other: how big an army could they order around, and how quickly? How much military stuff could they command to be heaped at a given point within a given interval of time? Clearly this principle can be applied to any human being. How much power do YOU have to get what you want on command? Could you even get sandwiches delivered, much less a tank or a nuclear warhead?

It seems like such an absurdly obvious connection to make—political power with physical power—that I can't imagine I'm on new ground here. I've never read much political theory or economic theory or anything of that sort, so I've no idea how scholars and experts, both genuine and fraudulent, have been talking about power in the political sense, or whether there have been attempts to quantify it. What's clear enough is that the public political discourse on power has been kept deliberately vague. This is true especially from right-wing authoritarians who have been restlessly trawling through every U.S. legal document, from the Constitution on down, attempting to find pretexts for exercising the broadest possible powers. They have a vested interest in keeping political power obscure and mystified, just as capitalists have an interest in keeping money in a permanent fog of nonsense and crackpot theories.

Perhaps the Cohost readership can assist me here? This is very much not my field. Have there been attempts to quantify political power in physical terms, such as I'm suggesting here?

~Chara of Pnictogen

I just realized that if Frigg had known about the chemical periodic table, protecting Baldr would have been much easier for her

no need to ask every plant and stone separately, just...ask all the elements nicely. "please don't hurt my precious uwu child"

would Frigg have just forgotten one? "oh pfft thallium? where do you even get thallium from?" except that's one of the worst elements to eat, hah

~Chara

One of the greatest mysteries in my life is why we never became a gamer geek. There were many times when it seemed possible, when we got really into video games for a bit, lost in them honestly. But it was always a guilt-ridden pleasure, associated with really low points in life. And now we struggle to play any games at all.

Why didn't we become Berdly? We almost did—it felt like that sometimes. We took IQ seriously once, we were absurdly proud of those meaningless Science Olympiad medals, we "debated" on Usenet, all that. Certain incidents at Caltech put an end to the science nerd, though. After those incidents we were adrift and no longer knew what were supposed to be doing, and we could not explain that to our parents or anyone.

We never completely abandoned games, though...now did we.

~Chara of Pnictogen