140: There is no Free Lunch
3/3/2025
I was just working out the mechanics of the counter-weight pully system for getting up and down the emergent trees without having to climb, for Chapter 71: A Friend’s Song, when it dawned on me that I was trying to cheat the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It took me more than a minute to realize I’d need an endless supply of stones at the top of the tree to both ascend and descend repeatedly.
To lift just 12 men who weigh 15 stones each would require 204 stones to return the harness back down for all 12. Then an additional 24 stones for them to get back down – 2 stones for each so they’d weigh 17 stones to counteract the 16-stone counterweight. And once these 228 stones are down at the bottom, how do you get them back up?
Not for free. There is no free lunch. There’s not even a break-even exchange.
The only possible solution is that the pully counter-weight device is only for descending. They all climb up, then use the counterweight for an easy descent. They’ll need an extra line of equal length to that holding the counterweight to ease the harness back up, otherwise if you simply let go at the bottom the counterweight would fall with a crash. They can tie it off at the bottom momentarily, but nobody could descend after them until they eased it back up to the tree’s upper platform.
This could work, but it’s not as versatile and fancy as I was hoping. Those pesky laws of physics are always ruining everything.
Anyway, back to work.
Present-Day Reflection
10/12/2026
It seems I’m always trying to break the rules and do things my own way in order to achieve what I want. Even the rules built into the fabric of nature. Almost as if I don’t trust anything I’m told until I found out for myself the hard way.
I’m getting to that point now within the context of self-publishing as well. I’m realizing that I’m not special and that I’m going to have to do what every other independent unknown self-publishing author has had to do in order to find my audience. The dream of “build it and they will come” is not enough. And now it’s time to return the books I’ve read on marketing and do what I’m told I should to make myself known.
There is no free lunch, and even a miracle needs a hand.
