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Engine On a Chip May Beat the Battery
Krishna Dagli writes, "MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight, powering laptops, cell phones, radios, and other electronic devices." From the article: "All the parts work. We're now trying to get them all to work on the same day on the same lab bench." The goal is to do that by the end of the year.
Other than the obvious geek factor, why would we want to increase our dependancy on a fossil fuel.
I'm just guessing here, but maybe because we are monkeys.
We are, after all, the species that dropped automotive research into aerodynamics for the better part of fifty years because the marketing droids realized that aerodynamic shapes would limit the scope of pointless re-stylings that can be used to sell monkeys new cars they don't need every few years.
Humans are not very far out of the trees, driven by monkey drives of hierarchy and status. These drives are remarkably robust, to the extent that all attempts to subvert them are rapidly subverted themselves, giving us folks like Stalin at the extremely pointed pinnicle of a "classless" society.
These failures have nothing to do with people not being "good enough" for non-hierarchical societies, any more than whales persistently dieing on the beach is evidence that they are not "good enough" to live on land. It is simply a matter of our nature, which is unfortunately largely ill-suited to creating stable, sane, passably decent societies that use technology for the betterment of all rather the convenience of some and the oppression of many.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Right, such an asshat, for you know, wanting someone to actually use terminology correctly. Damn that scientific accuracy, it's just for big jerks.
What a shocker, I've been modded down for bullshit reasons exactly 5 times this week. Shame the number 5 isn't somehow a natural number for moderation or anything.