Slashdot Mirror
Hamster-Powered Night Light
An anonymous reader writes "Though Skippy the Hamster powers this night light by running on his excercise wheel, the same concepts and low-rpm alternator design could be applied to a school science project using different energy sources! A small wind or hydro turbine could easily power this alternator. The Otherpower.com staff thought of building a hamster-powered nightlight a couple years ago at a rather, uh, soused company Christmas party. Then recently Analise, an 8th grader from Albuquerque, NM, contacted DanF through the AllExperts.com Science For Kids forum, asking 'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?'"
power your website while it's being slashdotted.
Would it work with badgers?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Man has finally harnessed the power of animals. Soon we will be able to bring animals to other fields, replacing farm equipment and automobiles.
Let's not forget that one can hate his government, but love his country.
String a baked ham to the thing and see if she can light up Chicago.
Thankyou, I'll be here all week. Try the fish.
Skippy dies due to slashdotting a site with 14 pictures of him... Now who is going to power the annoyingly loud little nightlight?
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
(Cue the 'Step 3: Profit' jokes now... we all know they're coming)
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
From ALBUQUERQUE, you say?
ALBUQUERQUE (n.)
A shapeless squiggle which is utterly unlike your normal signature, but which is, nevertheless, all you are able to produce when asked formally to identify yourself. Muslims, whose religion forbids the making of graven images, use albuquerques to decorate their towels, menu cards and pyjamas.
Ha. I shall power my entire house with my army of one button mice
A desert covered in hordes hamster wheels, all providing power to the Western U.S.
We can hire Mexican immigrants to change the wood shavings!
'Can a rodent generate enough electricity to power a light by running on it's wheel?'
If it thinks it's being chased by Richard Gere, then yes, it probably can.
Anyone who uses Bigpond in Australia knows that hamsters power their central server complex.
Been known about for several years.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
I've been using my human power to get to the Internet during power outages
Does running down the street shouting "HELP! Does anyone have 'net access at the moment? I need the interweb!" really count?
You obviously don't know kids, what is needed is a light when they are going to sleep and if they wake up crying the rat needs to be trained to jump on the wheel and run.
So much less than 10+ hours of running is needed, but I am sure one of those super marathon rodents from yesterday couldn't hurt.
Now that we can be replaced with hamsters, why are the machines going to keep us around? I imagine they'll get a great ROI by ditching the human based Matrix in favor of a less complex one designed to simulate a glass cage with tubing in some 5th grader's bedroom.
Google cache here
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
He is the light of the world, after all (John 8:12). And he doesn't even need a hamster.
How many of these would be required to power a time machine?
-Stephen
It's Step 4: Profit. Sheesh, everyone knows that. Step 3 is the missing step.
Come Pinky! We must prepare for tomorrow night! Why? What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain? The same thing we do every night, Pinky... Try to power the norhteastern seaboard!!!
Quote: "To save energy, it would make sense to utilise the senselessly relentless pedestrian marathon tendencies of the domestic hamster (fatface domesticus). ..."
loc. cit.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
enough to power a vibrator.
There's numureous ways according to this
Sample this!
10 hours a day eh? I think my fiancee's hedgehog can handle that. It runs. All. Night. Long. Off to work so I can get some sleep....:)
could it power my mouse /PC ?
hey no Hamster breaks while I'm onli
Can I get these fricken hamsters with self powered fricken laser beams on their fricken heads?
Who is John Cabal?
Isn't this old news? ;)
I thought they had been using hampsters to power Hondas for years?
Who would be able to come in the morning and turn on the lights to find the bikes?
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
Why does this sound like a pre-cursor to the matrix or something?
=)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sorry! The mutiple hampster wont power much beyond the LED. Dexter tried it with 100 and no go! Would not recharg his lab!
Even if you use a larger creature like a water buffalo like Gyro Grearloos did in an underdevelop country. It still takes way too many men to shove them up and down the ramp to generate power.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Woah, and Keanu Reeves wakes up from the Matrix and discovers that he's a hamster! I knew it, and it explains so many things about him!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
One hamster may not be much, but imagine a building full of hamsters each running on its own wheel! And for those peak usage periods just throw in a cat to the mix.
from Budweiser where you had a rodent running in a wheel with a Budweiser in front of it. Some guy passes by and decides to take the beer. At that exact moment, the rodent stops running and all of New York light's turn off. So the guy decides to put it back in front of the wheel and the rodent starts running again, turning the lights of the city back on.
Captured the mouse in my room.
Told him to run fast enough to power my night light.
He didn't run fast enough to make enough light for me to see to feed him so he didn't have enough energy to run fast enough to...
Result: dead mouse. No night light.
Now I can't see to clean up the dead mouse.
Room smells bad.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I look around my cubicle, sigh, and reflect that I know just how that sodding Hamster feels.
http://www.techspot.com/gallery/showphoto.php/phot o/433 :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).