Well, knowledge advancement has been sporadic at best over the past thousands of years, and we’re still chewing on the yummy goodness of Albert Einstein’s exquisitely delicous equation: Exquisiteness = m&m x c² — which in layperson terms means that we can extract a gluteus-maximus-load of satisfaction from even the simplest of pleasures, as long as they melt in our mouths, and not in our hands!

But back to high-energy physics for a moment, at 0.9 gram per m&m, Einstein’s equivalence tells us that the colorful little treats pack as much as 20 GigaWatt-hours of energy, each. Suck on them for 5 seconds on average and that’s 16 TeraWatts of mind blowing power delivered straight to the zygomaticuses, if they can handle it! And that’s where graduate students come in …

Imagine if you will, an automated delivery system that disptaches exactly one m&m every five seconds to a distinct graduate student in an appropriately large cohort (from a hopper for example), and the continuous yummy goodness of power that this would produce: 20,000 times what Three Miles Island’s TMI-1 generates, with the added bonus of nonstop flavourful delectability! But guess what …

We’ll never get there without major investments in education, with each generation getting us closer to figuring out mass-to-energy conversion, or as I like to call it: nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom! 8^b

Not yet.

Ah, Indian Point, I remember it well. Big enough to be a little scary, not big enough to dent NYC’s energy needs.

It was a sad day for my little data center of 5K Linux beasties…We observed a nanosecond of silence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center