Slashdot Mirror
Segway Inventor Turns To Environment
MBCook writes "CNN has an article in which they talk about Dean Kamen's latest inventions designed to provide water to rural villages. His goal is also to provide electricity and opportunities for entrepreneurship. From the article: 'Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water,' says Kamen. 'The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.'"
It's part of the price to pay for development.
Every industrialized nation at some point or another went through a period of dirty industry.
Also think of it this way.... London today has the highest air quality it's ever had. Think about it.... first you had cooking/heating fires, then you had dirty industry, and now you've got a clean economy. I don't doubt that the rest of the world will eventually go through the same process.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns.
So now, instead of a village in the Phillipines using relatively clean water that's been percalating through a forested area, they will just burn even more of the trees to power their water cleaners, resulting in even more of this (which surviving local villagers said was due to illegal logging on the surrounding hills). Yes, TFA indicates that it's cow dung that will be burned... but that just means that the wholesome goodness of that dung is not going into agricultural fertilization, which means either shipping in artificial/processed fertilizers, or very inefficiently using more land for grazing and crop production... including cutting into forests (see above).
Yes, most of us "burn things" for clean water (to extract from a well, or to run a municipal water treatment facility), but things like this at the local level strike me as putting a tiny, tiny bandage on the symptom of a much larger problem. To wit: too many freakin' people in areas not developed enough to sustain them without very poor land use. I mean... a kilowatt? Between solar, and perhaps some of the village kids taking turns in a big hamster wheel, you could do that without burning more stuff. And, for someone who included the notion of improving the "leisure time" of poor villagers, he's not thinking too clearly about the delightful aroma that comes with 24x7 burning of cow dung.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe, maybe not, but look at his other work before deciding.
If Benjerman Franklin was only considered for his stove*, he would be considered a failure.
While they work extremely well if kept stoked, once they began to cool a little, they got extremely smokey. Meaning they weren't practical.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm usually skeptical of a lot of efforts to solve poverty through technology- but this is definitely headed in the right direction. In my opinion, the most pressing needs in the developing world are the most basic ones: clean water, food, medical care, roads, electricity, basic literacy. Laptops or whatever are way down on the list because their potential payoff is relatively small compared to their cost. Things like clean water and cheap electricity could have big payoffs with relatively little investment; if you're suffering from less disease your productivity will go up, if you have light in the evening your kids can do their homework and the parents can do more work.
Whether or not he's got the solution, he's at least got the right problems.
the places that will be using these probably have little to no environmental rules and where they do generate power it may just as likely be something like unfiltered coal fired plants and other pollutants. i would also bet you that if you deploy a bunch of these, that given country will pollute less than the United States.
i realize this is far from ideal, but maybe somebody else can come up with a more environmentally friendly fuel pellet than "whatever you got that will ignite". in the meantime disease and death will be reduced because people can find a clean cup of water.
From TFA: A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their leisure times. -- Yes, and then it's all downhill from there: first light bulbs, then telephones for telemarketers to call, televisions for advertisers to stuff with their ads all aglow, microwave ovens to provide late-night high-fat carbohydrate-laden heart sludge, personal computers from which to have one's identity stolen, not to mention thirty-five clocks to set forward every Spring, etc. I hope these people who have lived in the beautiful nighttime darkness for so long know what they're getting themselves into.
The Big News Page
One thing to keep in mind is the scale of the problem. Did you eliminate 1000 people dying of dysentary to replace them with 10 people dying of cancer a few years down the road? Certainly they need to fix the arsenic problem, but even with it the technology is still a huge win.
I read the internet for the articles.
No matter how stupid, useless and over-hyped the Segway was, Dean Kamen is still a fucking genius and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
His insulin pump was so brilliant, it looks obvious in hindsight (as the best inventions often do.)
Even the Segway, which is a silly gadget, makes a sort of sense. He was hoping to make a consumer product which (had it caught on with people) would apply economies of scale to his gyroscopic concepts, which would eventually make his stair-walking wheelchairs cheaper.
If he wants to turn his mad skillz to the problem of getting clean water to people, I gotta take off my hat.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Is London's economy really "clean" or did they just farm out the dirty work? Is the environmental hit just being taken in another part of the world?
This would be fucking great for fish farms.
Fisheries generate a lot of crap-filled water that generally gets pumped into (and pollutes) a local river.
Of course, this guy's invention would have to be scaled waaaaay up for farmers of any kind in the 1st world, since they have enormous plots of land compared to most farms in 3rd world & developing countries.
Still, Kudos to him, because he's right. Finding potable water is actually a greater problem than access to food in most of the 3rd world. However, the second you increase survival rates in those developing countries, you create a host of other problems as the population increases.
Countries are like ecosystems, once you fiddle with one variable, you usually have to deal with a rash of unintended consequences.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't understand all the backlash against the Segway either. I mean, if you want to attack stupid, wasteful and obnoxious vehicles, start with snowmobiles, trail bikes, then work your way to SUV's. The biggest problem with the Segway is that common folk can't afford it. If you could walk into the nearest bike store and take one home for $300, the critics would be drowned in the pool of fans. As it is, it's an attractive anti-yuppie target.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Perhaps you mean Tesla:) Edison was more businessman than inventor.....
...and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
Does that mean Kamen's stealing all of his inventions from Nikola Tesla, too?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Or, in the media and government version, it's easy to lose sight of the overall benefit when focusing on the individuals.
Sometimes, it may make sense to base policies on cold math rather than the emotional level of individuals. For example, pesticides vs. malaria.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
The condensation run off from the window-unit air conditioners in my house generate about 100 liters every 24 hours.
First of all, I'm calling bullshit on this. Either you live in a swamp, or there's something wrong with your air conditioner. Buy a new one and save the world 1kWh/day instead of producing distilled water with electricity.
Secondly, you realize you're advocating air conditioning as a means of water purification for undeveloped nations? That's just goofy.
Then you say a "3 or 4 square meter" solar panel is "cheap to make". And, assuming such a thing would even run a single air conditioner, you'd need one for, say, every two African villagers. Let's say this contraption costs $2000, which is a conservative figure. To outfit 100 million Africans, you're talking about $100 billion. And then of course who knows how long the things will last and whether they will be immediately confiscated by warlords and diverted to people who are actually productive enough to afford solar panels.
So, by now we've gotten to the point where you've completely lost your mind. As further evidence, "with a lot less complexity... than a boiler-driven generator". Umm, okay.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"