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What is 'IT'?
From "Service Call," a short story by Philip K. Dick:
The young man flushed, swallowed noisily, tried to grin, and then hurried on huskily, "Sir, I'm the repairman you asked for; I'm here to fix your swibble."
The facetious retort that came to Courtland's mind was one that later on he wished he had used. "Maybe," he wished he had said, "I don't want my swibble fixed. Maybe I like my swibble the way it is." But he didn't say that. Instead, he blinked, pulled the door in slightly, and said, "My what?"
"Yes, sir," the young man persisted. "The record of your swibble installation came to us as a matter of course. Usually we make an automatic adjustment inquiry, but your call preceded that -- so I'm here with complete service equipment. Now, as to the nature of your particular complaint..." Furiously, the young man pawed through the sheaf of papers on his clipboard. "Well, there's no point in looking for that; you can tell me orally. As you probably know, sir, we're not officially part of the vending corporation ... we have what is called an insurance-type coverage that comes into existence automatically, when your purchase is made. Of course, you can cancel the arrangement with us." Feebly, he tried a joke. "I have heard there're a couple of competitors in the service business."
Stern morality replaced humor. Pulling his lank body upright, he finished, "But let me say that we've been in the swibble repair business ever since old R.J. Wright introduced the first A-driven experimental model."
For a time, Courtland said nothing. Phantasmagoria swirled through his head: random quasi-technological thoughts, reflex evaluations and notations of no importance. So swibbles broke down, did they? Big-time business operations ... send out a repairman as soon as the deal is closed. Monopoly tactics ... squeeze out the competition before they have a chance. Kickback to the parent company, probably. Interwoven books.
[...]
A swibble. What the hell was a swibble? And he was on the in, industrially speaking. He read U.S. News, the Wall Street Journal. If there was a swibble he would have heard about it -- unless a swibble was some pip-squeak gadget for the home. Maybe that was it.
You can find this story in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 4: The Minority Report.
Thoughtfully, he added, "In fact I'd say the real war was a war over swibbles. I mean, it was the last war. It was the war between the people who wanted swibbles and those who didn't." Complacently, he finished, "Needless to say, we won."
It's It
What is it
It's it
What is it
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05971091__
That patent would seem to suggest you're on the right track . . .
- 6,092,249 - Constant pressure seating system
- 6,062,600 - Anti-tipping mechanism
- 6,062,023 - Cnatilevered crankshaft stirling cycle machine
- 5,975,225 - Transportation vehicles with stability enhancement ising CG modification
- 5,971,091 - Transportation vehicles and methods
- 5,794,730 - Indication system for vehicles
- 5,791,425 - Control loop for transportation vehicles
- 5,701,965 - Human transporter
- 5,522,568 - Position stick with automatic trim control
Hope this helps someone figure it out...This is not a Fugazi
Fits inside a duffel bag and a couple cardboard boxes (I'd guess moving boxes)
Can be assembled quickly with hex wrenches and a screwdriver...
That makes me think of a pair of rollerblades, or one of those scooter thingies!
2 models, the metro and the pro; Just those naming conventions make me think of rollerblades or scooters, too, with the metro being an economical version, and the pro with additional bells and whistles...
And the invention will "profoundly affect our environment and the way people live worldwide. It will be an alternative to products that are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities."
It sounds like he's describing something both economical and ecological, as an alternative to... cars? Buses?
I'm thinking... electrical scooters or rollerblades, that can be chained together, like links!
Say, something like a shopping cart sized device, allowing one to sit or stand, with safe and clean electrical power, allowing one to move at, say, 10mph for 25 or 35 miles?
Able to link and chain, to create caravans...
It'll confound people because it isn't quite a car, nor a sidewalk friendly device...
And it'll be definitely fun!
Also, it could have an additional contact strip, to draw power, inductively, from embedded power strips!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
IT probably stands for Individual Transport.
It will be an alternative to the car. Thus the reference to the 'billion dollar old line companies' and 'social institutions' - in America, and in many places around the world, the car is a powerful social symbol.
The model named 'Metro' fits with a metropolitan-based transportation device.
Kamen has most recently worked on the 'active' wheelchair, which 'transports' an 'individual'. It would be natural that his mind is still focused on 'individual transport'.
Screwdrivers and hexwrenches indicate a mostly mechanical device, although I wouldn't preclude some pretty smart electronics. His active wheelchair can beat a human in a shoving match and stay balanced, no mean feat.
Anyway, I would bet on IT being some adaptation of the active wheelchair technology. Some sort of powered scooter you strap to your legs? Motorized shoes? Power roller-blades?
For those too lazy to see the above link: Page two says:
He might run into problems with the Stirling engine, too. The development of a marketable Stirling device has eluded the brightest engineering minds since Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, patented the first version in 1816. The basic principle of Stirling's external combustion engine is simple: A chamber is filled with a gas that expands as it is heated by a small heat source, such as a propane flame, and contracts when cooled. The process operates a piston and drives the engine. The advantage? Cheap, local fuels can be used to run the engines, and Kamen has adapted his model to produce electricity instead of mechanical power.
But producing the thing is a more complex matter. While many have tried to use Stirlings to power drive shafts for vehicles, they have proved too expensive to manufacture on a mass scale, and they're not always efficient enough. One low tech problem is designing seals that guard against waste as the heat is transferred into a form that does useful work.
Deka's version heats a chamber containing helium, under pressure, and Kamen says it can run on gasoline, propane, fuel oil, diesel, alcohol, or even solar power - with one-fifth the emissions of a gas stove. Deka's engineers think they'll succeed where others have failed because they've ironed out all the kinks. "We looked at the history of the Stirling - all the money and time and expertise poured into it - and identified a half-dozen key goofs that previous teams had made," says project leader Chris Langenfeld. "Seventy percent of it was a materials challenge. We had to track down the right composites to use as seals."
Kamen hopes that his family of Stirlings, five years in development, will soon bring portable electricity to nations without a reliable power grid - or any grid at all. He envisions briefcase-sized Stirlings powering cell phones and cell towers, as well as purifying water. He aims to have them on the market in the next two years, and is currently working on the marketing issues - like how developing nations will be able to afford bulk purchases of the engines, which are projected to cost $1,500 apiece.
I think our friend Ross C. Bracket may have what IT is... a stirling engine powered scooter(?)?
Going on the assumption that the name 'Ginger' is significant somehow, I did a Google search for the word Ginger and other words like 'transportation' and 'Mythology' and 'flight'.
The most intriguing match I found was to the character 'Ginger' in Chicken Run.
A quote from the review "<I>...partly thanks to Ginger, who believes that he'll be able to teach her and the rest of the chickens to fly</I>".
Could this be an invention that will help us 'learn to fly'??
From the article:
According to the proposal, another investor, Credit Suisse First Boston, expects Kamen's invention to make more money in its first year than any start-up in history, predicting Kamen will be worth more in five years than Bill Gates.
Bill Gates has more than US$60 billion to his name. That means this company would go from $0 to >$60 billion in five years? My first reaction is that this is complete horseshit, but if Credit Suisse First Boston, an arm of a major Swiss bank, is behind it, it must certainly carry some weight.
But think about the sheer logistics behind rocketing to more than $60 billion in corporate worth in only five years... it absolutely boggles the mind!
Jobs told Kamen the invention would be as significant as the PC, the proposal says.
If Steve Jobs says this, he just might be on to something. But how many things have been trumpeted as "PC replacements" in the past, oh, ten years?
--
It took some thinking, but I've figured out what IT is... IT is the newest piece of immensely overhype and excessively shrouded bit if techno hype to be produced since Transmeta's cryptic web page first went up!
And people are having such a hard time figuring out what IT is...
:)
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Bah. None of you are thinking big enough. I say IT stands for Instantaneous Transport That's obviously why he needed to build 2 of them - one to transmit, and one to receive.
OK, so I know I'm dreaming, but I want personal teleportation...
-Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Dang. I submitted this question Ask Slashdot style under science, hoping it would get serious attention, seeing as how Dean Kamen has brought a lot of good to this world through scientific advances.
My personal hope is that the Stirling engine discussed on page 2 of this Wired article is approaching commercial viability. Cheap portable power generation using virtually any kind of fuel? Sounds awesome and of great potential beneifet to humanity. Anyone close to the project have any inside info? Anyone familiar with this technology want to further explain its coolness?
That is the one word the Knights who say Ni cannot stand! Ni! Ni! Ni!
Stupid Cheap Guitars