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Self-Heating Coffee Hacking
ptorrone writes "Awhile back I wrote about the new Wolfgang Puck self-heating coffee containers that took 10 years and $24 mil to develop. Well, I managed to find them in a local store and bought them to take apart to see how they work. Once activated, they reach 145 degrees in about 6 minutes. This isn't a review of the beverage, it's all about the stuff that makes the liquid hot, how it works, pictures and links to patents. I am looking in to how these could be recycled too."
I wish that worked on girlfriends...
Hot coffee hack? Wait till the ESRB hears about this!
But why would anyone buy Wolfgang Puck's coffee, which I've never heard him associated with? It's like the idea of buying Lil' Caesar tea... why would I?
After the article earlier about the GTA hack, /.ers will all be much more interested in hot coffee than before.
Getting Wolfgang Puck to endorse it :-p
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Let's just plug the MAKE blog's rss feed into Slashdot directly!
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I bet you'll start seeing obnoxious pple going through all of a store's stock pushing the heat button on each of the cans so that the end customer gets cold coffee :p
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
You see, the thing that many people in the US completely miss is that the breweing of coffee was perfected in 1855 and it is senseless to mess with it. A shot of espresso made with freshly roasted / ground beans and on a well maintained machine by a well trained barrista is the apex of coffee perfection and cannot be improved upon.
Wow, spoken like a true innovator. You must work for Microsoft.
Your welcome to wear this as a condom
Just make sure it doesn't heat up to 145 degrees on you.
$500k = team of engineers to figure out how to make 10 million containers per month.
$24,490k = marketing guys to decide on shape of the container and what to print on the outside of it.
I can't believe that noone has made the obligatory joke about the old woman who spills the Wolfgang Puck coffee on herself and then sues him for millions.
Followed by the debunking replies who will supply the link to snopes.
Followed by the bashing of lawyers.
Then someone will blame it on MS/USPTO/RIAA/SCO.
By then it will have thankfully dropped to the bottom of the page and then into old news.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Than I suppose it is safe to say by (sadly) not fornicating today I have also defied God's will. I'll go to confession tonight and try to do better tomorrow, I promise.
Antimatter would do a great job heating it up, but at the loss of a portion of the coffee, which would be annihilated. I hate seeing good coffee wasted, even on such an efficient process as total conversion of matter to energy.
Fitting a magnetic bottle and cyclotron into a small portable coffeecup is also somewhat of a dilemma.
Off topic, but...
The energy in a matter-antimatter (proton anti-proton) reaction goes toward the production of various particles that are of sufficiently high energy to pass right through your coffee: muons, gamma rays. Neutrinos too, which don't interact.
Under the unrealistic assumption that all the energy produced goes toward heating the coffee:
2ng matter + 2ng antimatter = 4e-9 g
E = m*c^2
= 4e-9 g * (3e8 m/s)^2
= 3.6e8 g*m^2/s^2
A joule is kg*m^2/s^2, so we're looking at 3.6e5 J of energy. Approximating coffee with water, water has a heat capacity of 4186 J/(kg*K), and assuming we have 100 cm^3 of it:
3.6e5 J / 4186 J/(kg*K) / 0.1 kg = 8600 K
I hope you like your coffee vaporized.
Wow, spoken like a true innovator
Wow, you managed to get in the obligatory anti-Microsoft comment on a story about a coffee can. Now that's innovation.
You know, the real meaning of such statements completely eludes me. Forgetting for the moment that "God's Will" is, shall we say, subject to interpretation, let's take a closer look at this. For example, if I simply choose not to fornicate at all, the end result is exactly the same as if had had sex but used a condom effectively. Would that be against His Will? Presumably it would be (.e.g, no babies) so I should under no conditions wear a condom or abstain from sex, and always avail myself of an opportunity to inseminate a woman (I think I just described Slashdotter heaven, but that's a discussion for another day.)
... Biblical.
... or not.
In keeping with our desire for 100% expression of God's Will, women should be required to have sex with any man that desires them, with (ahem!) stiff penalties for every act of refusal. Under ideal conditions, then, every act of intercourse should result in one (or more) offspring. Furthermore, women should be required to be continuously pregnant because (of course) if a woman isn't pregnant then yet another one of God's creations is being denied expression.
Actually, what we should be doing is developing a drug which will force a woman's ovaries to expend all of their eggs over the course of her reproductive years, so that not a single one of God's potential creations is left unborn. Kind of an anti-prophylactic quintuplet enhancer, you might say. Of course, the misery and suffering that would inflict upon an already overpopulated world would be, well
I don't know how we could possibly handle converting the trillions upon trillions of excess sperm cells into babies, though. There aren't enough eggs on the planet. You need to face facts: the reproductive systems of humans and most plants and animals are extremely "wasteful" of genetic material, and in our case are no more or less wasteful whether a given act of intercourse results in implantation
Unless what you're really saying is that all the pleasure a man and a woman can generate between them is inherently wrong and against God's Will. For a whole lot of people, that's about the only thing they have to make life tolerable, and in my not particularly humble opinion it wrong be immoral to take that away from them. There's enough suffering already on this stupid planet, thank you very much. More of God's Will, I suppose.
When you get right down to it, given all the other less-useful things our civilization throws into its landfills, condoms are at the bottom of the wastefulness scale.
So let me get this straight-
To set yourself up, you do the hike the first time, and leave yourself your caches at predetermined intervals.
Then, when you are ready, you do the hike all over again , happy in the knowledge that you already did the complete hike once to save yourself time and effort.
Clearly this isn't backcountry backpacking you are talking about.
jesus, not hot coffee, anything but hot coffee.
What do you expect? Just don't put it on your nuts and you'll be fine.
Better to get some of the self-heating pads from army MREs.
Yeah, but they'll only work if you have a rock, or something.
This happened to me twice. That's why I don't post anything meaningful anymore if I post at all.
Laws are for people with no friends.