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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.'"
What he should be doing is marketing this to rural farmers in developed countries. If I lived on a farm with access to the fuel, I would love to have a kilowatt generator for $1000 to supplement my electricity use.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Anyone know what the energy density of cow dung is? I assume it takes a few cow patties to fule a sterling engine powered generator that puts out 1kW. Bet it takes a lot more to boil enough dirty water to produce 1000L a day of distilled water.
I've had an idea for a while for a solar-powered water condensor. The condensation run off from the window-unit air conditioners in my house generate about 100 liters every 24 hours. Granted, the compressors and fans use a lot of power, but I figure that you could have a big solar panel - maybe 3 or 4 square meters - on top of a 10 foot pole so kids wouldn't mess with it, and you could get several hundred watts out of it. Relatively cheap to make, simple to run, and I've seen these window units run for years without maintenance. Seems like it'd be quite doable, and with a lot less complexity and potential to wear or break than a boiler-driven generator like what Segway Boy has in mind.
A-Bomb
Kamen's Segway fiasco was a mistake. Now he's back on track.
Segway is just a basic, two-wheel version of his iBot wheelchair. You know, the wheelchair that can climb stairs and raise the user up high enough to talk to standing adults? The wheelchair that's based on all of the inventions that made the Segway possible.
Segway isn't a fiasco, it's an overhyped consumer toy. He probably makes a handsome profit from it.
Yes.
And now I ask you - what good would a third wheel do for a wheelchair that climbs stairs? Especially when it already has more than three wheels.
The gyroscope was so that the chair would stay level when it had to go up on its hind wheels to climb the stairs.
www.linuxpenguin.net
What's very interesting about village microloans is the extremely low rate of default. When you have a group of people involved in ensuring that a loan is repaid, especially in small matriarchal societies, you end up with as little as a 5% default rate.
The rumormill says this time, "it" will consist of a rider on the segway carrying water bottles for the needy.
How about instead of just a $100 laptop, a $3 durable, easily fixable bicycle with add-on attchments for trailers? Or make some special type of wheel that, when used by a LOT of people in a common area, it paves a new road for them. Okay, now I'm thinking in Civilization terms(but those roads came in handy).
Gotta transport that water & stuff somehow.
The big problem with the Segway was the hype, not the merits of device itself. When Jeff Bezos said that he could see cities being redesigned around the thing, we all thought that it had to be something revolutionary and amazing that would lead us all to change.
What he really seems to have meant was that for the device to sell, cities would have to be redesigned first. It's too heavy, fast, and unmaneuverable to ue on sidewalks, and it's too slow, unprotected, and unmaneuverable to use on streets. In essence, for the Segway to work, there'd have to be a completely new set of lanes for it. Additionally, it has all the problems of not protecting against the elements or having cargo space that prevent it from truly replacing cars. It's also far too expensive for the average person to justify the limited utility.
To sum up, it costs too much and can't be used in a majority of outdoor situations. It was overhyped when it had commercial flop written all over it. The Segway was brilliant example of promising the world and delivering nothing.
Snowmobiles and trail bikes at least have thrill-seeking element that the 12.5 MPH, no off-roading Segway did not.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The LEGO Mindstorms beloved to so many Slashdotters are used by 9-14 year olds (basically grades 4-8) in the FIRST LEGO League International, which has participants in almost 2 dozen countries.
:)
And since last year, within the US they've been piloting a "Junior FIRST LEGO League" for ages 6-9. I just found out about it, and my daughter's in that age range... bet she'll be happy to hear.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
tap water should only be cleaned to a certain percent, which can be used for lawns / car-washes / firefighting / pools, cleaned a bit further for household uses (laundry, bathing) by an in-home filter, and cleaned further for drinking by a tap-based carbon filter (Brita, etc). But this is a lot of equipment.
I'm sure that due to economies of scale, the water utility can purify a given amount of water more efficiently than I can. (Those Brita filters are expensive!) So here's a better idea:
Run two pipes to every home. The big pipe carries minimally-cleaned water, and the small pipe carries water purified to human consumption standards. The lawn sprinkler system uses water straight out of the big pipe. For laundry and bathing, use a blend of, say, 70% from the big pipe and 30% from the small pipe.
It's kind of like how Sunoco stations used to sell about six different grades of gasoline. There were only two tanks in the ground, and the pump mixed the top-shelf stuff with the base stuff to achieve the desired octane.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
In some ways, first-world farmers are efficient (or at least, productive). The production outputs by one farmer these days is pretty amazing, compared to even 30 years ago. But it sucks up a LOT of energy resources. There is a swing in some areas to methods that take fewer inputs, yet receive the same or nearly the same production outputs that "traditional" methods use. No-till seed drilling, dual-cropping, etc are some of the ways to it.
For those who question it, have you ever seen pictures from when wheat was harvested with horse-drawn equipment? Lessee... 40-horse team was not uncommon, a crew to run the steam engine and thresher, where to put the mountain of straw? Lots of work for teenage boys stacking sacks of grain. It used to be a MAJOR endeavor. Now 4 or 5 combine drivers, a couple of tractors to pull grain wagons around, and a couple of trucks to take grain to the driers or silos, and 1000 acres/day harvested is not impossible.
Where I live (Willamette Valley, OR) is the major rye and fescue grass seed production areas in the US. Some of the methods people use require LOTS of work, yet my neighbor, who is big into no-till, does just fine with his no-till drill (he does a lot of custom no-till planting, too), plus doesn't spend a lot of time in the fall and spring removing cover crop or stubble, prepping the soil (plowing, discing, pulverizing, smoothing), etc. His no-till drill just sticks the seed right in. Sure, no-till is not for every crop, but it works well for grass.
He doesn't have a lot of bare fields this year, which is kind of luck of the draw given the rains here this winter. But other farmers, who have hundreds of acres of bare or fall-planted fields right now where the seed is just now starting to germinate (and don't do no-till), have suffered some pretty significant soil erosion this winter. Kind of sad, realizing all the topsoil that has been washed into the rivers. Plus, there is all the topsoil they convert into dust in the summer and fall, too.
Dairy farms are more and more starting to either make biogas generators (i.e., covering up the manure pits and piping the gas into compressors and burning it in generators. Makes sense if you've ever driven past an open manure pit on a hot summer day) or other equipment that rapidly breaks down the manure into water and solid products. But this equipment costs some pretty good coin.
yes, some of these equipment installations are because of environmental concerns of either waste water leaking into groundwater supplies or air quality concerns, but still... some of this is being done.
the average feedlot, however, probably is not into this as much. If you have enough manure volume, yes, there is a smallish side market of processing the manure pile into mulch or compost, but that's about it. Except for some special product areas (zoo poop, pelletized poultry waste), it's pretty low margin, so you need a lot of manure to make a go of it. it's pretty seasonal, too. Some environmental concerns are driving this kind of equipmentop,l for other livestock production as well (poultry, pork).
Me and my 30 or so sheep? Well, the sheep poop is good for the pasture. As long as I'm not taking the sheep off and putting them in someone's freeezers, it is a relatively closed loop as far as my pastures go (I don't need to fertilize a lot!).