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Gravity Lamp Grabs Green Prize
eldavojohn writes "A lamp powered by gravity has won the second prize at the Greener Gadgets Conference in NYC. From the article, "The light output will be 600-800 lumens — roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours. To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour glass-like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gentle glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp ... Moulton estimates that Gravia's mechanisms will last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year." The article contains links to the patents and the designer/inventor Clay Moulton's site." I think my laptop would require a slightly larger weight to pull this off.
Say what?!? Why on earth would they tell you that?
This is slashdot, we have articles here, not thinly disguised advertisements.
At the bottom of the
you will have to start flipping your desktop over every few minutes ;-)
How about a clock?
i'm going to use the light from this lamp to power my photovoltaic weight lifting machine.
Will it still be cool to light up your lamp with gravity, when there's no gravity left and people are spinning right off the planet into outerspace? I guess it will eliminate the greenhouse gas issue by allowing the atmosphere to disappear when there's no more gravity left - but unfortunately it will also not allow people to live (the ones that are still on the planet after the other ones spun off into space as noted earlier)
But what will we do after peak gravity?
You don't know the difference between a lamp and a clock?
One tells time, the other emits light. I thought that was fairly obvious.
Duh! Because it's a *light* powered by weights!
No sig for you!!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
My gerbils take offense to this. (No Richard Gere jokes, please)
I've already started looking into buying "gravity offsets" and trying to use as much rope, glue, velcro, and static cling as possible.
I like basketball!!1!
...think it means. The human body has only about a 20% thermal efficiency. Add to this the ecological cost of transporting goods to the human for consumption, and you'll see where I'm going with this argument: what's touted as a "green" device actually costs the planet more per hour than any other light fixture ever invented.
So this idea may be useful in 3rd world countries where power grids are not available, but anyone with access to hydroelectric, wind, solar, coal, or nuclear power will actually be doing less damage to the planet by plugging the same light bulb into a wall receptacle.
End rant.
I can't really see why a small electric motor couldn't be incorporated into the design to do this, surely it would be much more convenient?
So basically, this thing runs on pizza, pop tarts, coffee, mountain dew, and beer?
All you'd need is one that ran on heat, assuming you're not into necrophilia.
So it's like racking a 50 pound dumbbell from the floor. Piece of cake.
For the average male, yes. But this is slashdot. One only needs the strength of a wet noodle to post here, and actual exercise is frowned upon. As is leaving the basement for fresh air and/or a little sun.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
They should make one attached to your chair and powered by your own weight. Then the pop tarts and beer would make it work better.
If we rigged this up to the Total Gym, Chuck Norris could power the entire country in just 20 minutes a day for low low payments of $19.95.
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Why not a small internal combustion engine coupled with the electric motor?
That way, you could still run the light in a power failure by running the small ICE.
Hey, you could make the engine a little bigger and add some outlets so you could power other lamps.
(The outside of my tooth is delicious.)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
If only the machines in The Matrix knew this...
I like basketball!!1!
hmmmm... build a big one outside just to generate power with a wind-powered mechanical contraption to lift the weights...
* calls patent troll lawyer
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Maybe it uses one of those energy efficient bulbs. Those cut energy use by over half.
Factor of 2 accounted or, only 500 to go...
He could've made this even greener by incorporating a small bird or monkey whose job it was to crank this to the top. This way, the people of the world are motivated to preserve wildlife so that they can read novels at night.
Come on. I lift 50 pounds and much more many times most days... and I pay for it!
Think of it in terms of your health/fitness and gym membership fees you save.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Well, when you put it that way... I was worried about having to move 10 pounds. But 4.5 kg I can manage fine. Thanks!
I never won a green prize for that.
I guess I was ahead of my time.
All I remember was.. the brakes didn't work, and I felt pain for 2 weeks.
If you want to start that game, it is being powered by the Big Bang. ...which was powered by The Great A'tuin, when it Defecated.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Upon further inspection, it turns out the 50 lb mass is actually 50 6-volt lantern batteries. Oops.
And that's why, in the real world, people use real measuring units. We have 22.7kg falling through 1.47m under an acceleration of 10ms-2, giving 333.69J of energy. Over 4 hours, that is 23.2 milliwatts.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You doubt the power of His Noodly Appendage?
Your story reminds me of the time when I turned an ordinary bicycle into a gravity-powered superbike. I still have a scar from that one.
Legalize it.
Hey, don't you mean *vrooom*?
Legalize it.
Hey, I have one of those. Well, not quite. You have to take the bags out to a box in the back alley, but THAT never fills up.
Today Apple announces the brand new iLamp.
I'm about as weak as a guy can be
Give me your lunch money.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
My thought is that is was much related to the spin. I mean, if you could slowly spin a generator, you'd get power for as long as it would spin, right? I hate the friggin know it all idiots that post about how impossible it is, based on their physics 101 class in school. DUH, if your physics teacher knew how to make a revolutionary machine, he wouldn't be teaching your sorry butt.
Personally I think it is because people don't have maps and uh I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to understand thermodynamics.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Er, meet my BIGGER friends, "Fat Man" and "Little Boy". And go tell that blowhard "Tsar Bomba" to get lost.
In Liberty, Rene