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Popular Mechanics Awards Technological Innovation
PreacherTom writes "Every year, Popular Mechanics attempts to find the most innovative tech products and hand out a little notoriety. This year's honorees range from everyday items like a $17 Crescent RapidSlide wrench, which puts a new, faster spin on an already well-designed tool, to a high-end Lexus that can virtually park itself. PM took an extra step by honoring innovators in science, having solicited nominations from a board of editorial advisers that includes Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and Dr. Amy Smith, a professor at MIT. Winners include Burt Rutan (of SpaceShipTwo fame) and Angela Belcher (for her work with virus nanofabrication)."
How the hell does a /. submission get accepted about a popular mechanics article that has a link to businessweek.com instead of a link to the article at the popular mechanics website? There have got to be better submissions to choose from. /. seems to be going downhill like bad water these days.
Forget the fact that businessweek.com is one of the most poorly designed and annoying web sites on the internet. To be avoided by anyone who might want to actually read something without grinding their teeth flat.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
"...to a high-end Lexus that can virtually park itself."
Wouldn't you prefer a car that would *actually* park itself, not just park itself in VR?
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
It is funny that when viewing the slide show about technological innovations I have to click my mouse button twice, or move the mouse a little, to get the navigation buttons to work. If I leave the pointer positioned over the button when a new slide opens it is somehow no longer recognized as a button until I take some action.
Of course I'm stuck with IE 6 at the moment, so this problem may not afflict more capable browsers.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Well the meter is on the side of your house in case you missed it. Walk out there, and record the numbers. Cheap, and easy.
Oh and WTC 7 thats been explained. It was a fairly tall building compared to the rest and it was riddled with holes from debris (as was the rest) You figure it out.
Yes, let's verb random nouns and utterance them.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I don't think the submitter understands the negative connotations of the words "notoriety" and "notorious".
That didn't take long...
Next article: George W. Bush's top iPod picks!
Dark Reflection
I believe the AC meant too cheap to meter electric power. IE, free power.
about the article, does that crescent wrench slip? if it does not, I want one; otherwise its as worthless as a normal crescent wrench.
All of this is just incremental stuff, hardly any real improvement, and much at price levels that ordinary people should be smart enough to realize they simply cannot afford. If you want some real innovation try making something trusted work as it is needed, or even better yet try to do without all the latest gizmos. This could be the most important innovation of all since Affluenza is an empty experience and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has assured us that the future strength of nations globally is strongly related to their saving habits. Real innovation and empowerment, or the curse of some junk that will weight down your budget without providing genuine utility. The choice is yours.
My dad had SEVERAL of these things since I was a kid- of course, from a different
vendor than Crescent. Bought them out at Canton from a tools vendor. The things
have been around for decades now.
New and innovative, my backside...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
a high-end Lexus that can virtually park itself.
Considering some of the Lexus drivers I've seen around Cupertino, what's really needed is a self-driving Lexus.
If Toyota can pull that one off, the number of defensive driving maneuvers required within a block of Cupertino's major arterials can be considerably reduced.
I think you miss the point. Most technological development is incremental. For every "breakthrough" (and wasn't it just recently that we were reading about how frequently things are mis-termed 'breakthroughs'?) there is far more effort put into, and effect taken from, small incremental improvements to existing technologies.
You might not think much of low-sulfur diesel, but if it results in 10% of U.S. automobiles becoming diesel, it will probably have saved more gasoline than any alternative-energy scheme that's been proposed to date. The spring-loaded crescent wrench may seem like a trivial improvement, but it might make an existing tool -- one that's basically pretty good already -- even easier to use for a lot of people.
Frankly I'd much prefer that people spent their time making improvements to existing technologies, which have already proven their worth, than try to constantly reinvent the wheel in new and unproductive ways.
Incremental improvements may not seem that impressive on paper, but they're how progress and development actually happens. Look closely enough at most apparent "breakthroughs," and you'll really find a series of incremental gains, made one after the other. As a society we want to believe that inventors create new technologies out of whole cloth, as if divinely inspired, but this is rarely the case. More frequently, history picks the developer of what it deems to be the "key" incremental improvement and awards them the credit for the whole thing, more or less arbitrarily.
The "next big thing" will almost always really be a series of "next little things;" only in hindsight and in summation do they amount to much. Dismissing things because they are "incremental" is shortsighted.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If the old Omni magazine made your brow furl, if Discover makes you feel like a retard, if Scientific American is just plain incomprehensible to you, or if you are stuck in a WalMart waiting for your wife to buy make-up and there's nothing else to read, there's always Popular Mechanics. New articles about military hardware and cars in every edition! Why not buy some plans for a hovercraft from the back page? Plus: build things from wood! All in Popular Mechanics, the magazine for those too dumb for Discover.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They're still better than Popular Science. That's the magazine that that gave Windows 95 a "Best of What's New" award, although it was neither the best operating system (OS/2 and Macintosh were still better) or entirely new.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Oh, I should have pointed out before submitting that "this has not actually happened, but it could, because Li-Ions react poorly to high current loads, deep cycles, and short circuits."
Just pointing this out so that folks don't take my post seriously and falsely believe that the above has occurred. My point is that it could and they should have chosen NiMH, secondary alkaline, or other technologies long before even considering Li-Ion.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
As a New Mexico State employee, I just got free tickets to the next X-Prize Cup in Las Cruces. Barely Tested Rockets, the nerd's version of NASCAR!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Uh, that was NOT flamebait, it is an outline of a hypothetical situation; one that is not just possible, but also very likely.
If you've ever done ANY reading on battery technologies, you would know that lithium ion is an extremely poor choice for power tools due to the above (fictional) scenario.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I worked one college summer doing landscaping. Proper technique for pruning a branch that is larger than shears can handle is under, over, collar. First cut a notch a few inches out from the trunk underneath the branch. Then cut down from the top to meet the notch. Then cut the stub off at the collar, not flush with the trunk. The collar is the circular ring around the base of the branch and it contains natural defenses against insects, disease, and fungus. So cut diagonally at the base, keeping the collar.
Parent post is right, these shears are worse than worthless, they will hurt your trees.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
it would ahve been nice if you posted it in the story, but thanks for the follow up post. I was getting ready to search for confirmation, and the lambast you if you were wrong. No, you had to be all nice and point out that it was meant to be fictional to make a point. ;)
Thanks for nothing!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But potentially useful if you run out of matches, no?
What was once true, is no longer so
Lithium batteries, while volatile, deliver more power for less weight. You can get a "D" form factor Lithium battery with these specs:
20 AH life, 2A pulse, 250mA continuous drain.
Yes, they're explosive. Yes, they're restricted from travelling in aircraft. Yes, they can overheat and cause a chain reaction which can blow apart cinderblocks.
Yes, those batteries come with fuses to prevent short-circuiting.
The purpose of a battery is to store energy. If that energy is converted to heat at an unsafe rate, the battery will catch fire or explode. If you want to minimize that risk, you can decrease the energy density. Then you get a bigger battery.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
this has not actually happened, but it could
All except the part about their stock tumbling 78%. First off, I doubt that news of a battery recall would sink a tool manufacturer. Secondly, there is no such thing as Milwaukee stock - they're a subsidiary of the Hong Kong corporation, Techtronic Industries, and make up about 10% of that company's revenue (their revenue was less than $700 million at the time of their acquisition in 2005, compared to Techtronic's 2.8 billion).
-BbT
700 million of 2.8 billion is a lot higher then 10%... about 15% higher.
But he was just using them to illustrate a point.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Perhaps they meant *reward*?
-Rich
... math errors.
How embarrassing, especially when I'm being pedantic.
-BbT
I have, sitting on the desk in front of me right now (because I went and got it out of my tool drawer), a Quali-Kraft Sliding Adjustable Wrench I bought more than 20 years ago. In fact, I just identified one for sale on eBay at this moment by doing a title and description search for Quali-Kraft (eBay Item # 200033640390). You can see the slide in the third photo.
- Eric, InvisibleRobot.com