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Museum of the Future

Magnavox writes "In Boulder, Colorado tonight there is going to be a rather unusual announcement about the DaVinci Institute's effort to create a Museum of Future Inventions. This will be a museum where they exhibit things that haven't been invented yet, like spray on clothing, instant sleep, genetically engineered Velcro sheep, and metric time. Pretty creative stuff. Some of the people they have involved are Dr. Paul MacCready, inventor of the Gossamer Albatross and Paul Dusenbery, Founder of the Space Science Institute. This looks like serious competition for Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum."

6 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Innovation... by Blue-Footed+Boobie · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Innovation is going to be the US export of the future. Outsource the crappy tech support, outsource the manual labor. Create a workforce of innovation. Own the world through patents and ideas.

    Maybe this museum ill bring back some of the creativity that is so lacking in this current fed-everything-through-games-and-tv generation.

    --
    DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
  2. Re:I thought... by LWATCDR · · Score: 1, Interesting

    No... Time should be base 360. There should be 360 minutes in a day. You can divide the day into 36 decaminutes to replace hours. Time is how we relate to the rest of the universe. This way the sun moves through the sky one degree per minute.
    Now if you want to make 100 degrees in a circle then we can talk.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  3. Looney Tunes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Is it just me or were some of these ideas stolen from cartons?

    The moveable hole.
    Through-the-Earth Travel System.

    I just feel like Wiley Coyote should be using these things to capture the roadrunner.

  4. Degrees in a circle? by Trejkaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But there are 2*pi radians in a circle, using proper units.

    Shouldn't we make sure there are 2*pi hours in a day or something?

    --
    Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
  5. Not invented yet? by reality-bytes · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Surely if they've described the item / concept then they have just 'invented' it.

    At least that what the USPTO believes.

    --
    Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
  6. Re:I thought... by rusty0101 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Considering that the second is defined by the NIST as:
    'exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations or cycles of the cesium atom's resonant frequency'

    I am not sure I want the 'second' to be the standard increment of time.

    Remember, we use the second because we have divided the clock first into 12 hours, (12 day, and 12 night when the sun casts no shadow) then divided each hour into 60 increments called minutes, followed by another 60 increments of those called Minutes. The last two breakdowns were based upon the fact that the number 60 has more even combinations than any number less than it (1,60;2,30;3,20;4,15;5,12;6,10).

    The second is a convienence of earth bound existence. Once you step off earth, you need to adjust your clock to the local environment, meaning that the basic unit of time, (the second for us) is going to be different.

    To go with a purely metric time, you would want to start by acknowledging that the local time is not going to easily map to the current Metric time. Now use a convienent multiple of the resonant frequency of the cesium atom. Options would be 10,000,000,000 oscilations, 9,000,000,000 oscilations (to be closer to the current definition) or 1,000,000,000 oscilations. (My recomendation.)

    Are there some serious problems that this would present? Sure. Hz frequency measurements would all have to be revised. (and yes that would affect your cpu processor speed calculations) Speed of Light constants would have to be recalculated (these recalculations would really be a simple ratio function, but it would annoy all sorts of people.) Natural frequencies would have to be revised. Etc.

    Just my own thoughts. (Now go take a look at some of the later definitions of the length of a meter, and see how these ideas would affect that.)

    -Rusty

    --
    You never know...