[H/t: Mark Blyth]

In the wake of the RNC, here's G.A. Cohen's paper from a few years ago, before his death obviously:

“Professor Cohen, how many Fellows of All Souls does it take to change a light bulb?”

“Change?!?”

The present paper defends the attitude that I just expressed in my answer to the chair’s question. I have for decades harboured strongly conservative, that is, strongly small-c conservative, opinions, on many matters that are not matters of justice, and I here mount an exposition and defence of what I believe to be my widely, although perhaps not universally, shared, conservative attitude. (I do not have conservative views about matters of justice because what conservatives like me want to conserve is that which has intrinsic value, and injustice lacks intrinsic value2 (and has, indeed, intrinsic disvalue). I shall say something in section 7 about the relationship between small-c conservatism and large-C Conservatives, many of whom are indeed devoted to conserving injustice.)

I am a kind of conservative not only in that I have the strong small-c conservative attitude that I shall describe, but also in that I endorse certain conservative factual assessments according to which a lot of valuable things have been disappearing lately. I join the ranks of the complainers down the ages who say: “Things ain’t what they used to be.”

Do not suppose that, because that lamentation is perennial, it’s misplaced. Anti- conservatives say, “Oh, well, people have always said that things are getting worse”, and anti-conservatives mean thereby to convey that the conservative lamentation expresses an illusion.3 But it is entirely possible that at any rate certain kinds of things have always been worse than they were before.4 Remember the wise Hungarian, who, upon being asked how things were going for him, said: “Oh, you know, things are about average. Not as good as yesterday, better than tomorrow.” In fact, I think lots of good old things are being lost and lots of good new things are arriving. It is the conservative disposition, in the present sense of ‘conservative’, to lament the first fact more than non conservatives do. (As I’ll explain in section 3, it doesn’t follow that a person who is conservative in the present sense welcomes the second fact – that lots of good new things are arriving – less than non-conservatives do.) But there will be no defence of my conservative factual assessments in what follows.

From the description at YouTube:

These are two gigantic solid state musical Tesla Coils. A Tesla Coil is a special type of transformer invented by Nikola Tesla that is able to generating extremely large voltages using a phenomenon known as electrical resonance. Each coil in this video is capable of generating a 13 foot spark. This equates to about 500,000 volts of electricity.

The primary drive system for the coils consists of high power semiconductors arranged into an H-Bridge switching configuration. During a spark event, the coil is pulsed on for a few hundred millionths of a second. During this short time, thousands of amps circulate within the primary tank circuit and the energy is coupled into the secondary resonator through magnetism.

So what appears to be a continuous burst of sparks is actually a specific number of sparks generated per second. By modulating the number of sparks that emit from the coil each second, different tones can be produced by the coils.

These coils were constructed by Eric Goodchild and Steven Caton.