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Inside Dean Kamen's Seceded Island of Geekery

mattnyc99 writes "The new issue of Esquire has a long, in-depth, intricate profile of Dean Kamen and his quest to invent a better world. Earlier this month, we discussed Kamen's Sterling-electric car, but this piece goes into much more detail about how that engine works — he got the original idea from the upmodded Henry Ford artifact in the basement of his insane island lab — and about how his inventions often go overlooked, including the Slingshot water purifier that Stephen Colbert made famous but that no one has actually bought yet. Quoting: 'To get the Slingshot to the 20 percent of the world that doesn't have electricity, Kamen came up with the idea of splitting it in half. Leaving the Stirling aside, he would try to develop a market for his distiller in parts of the developing world that have electricity but not reliable clean water. "There are five hundred thousand little stores in Mexico," he says. "If we can put one of these in 10 percent of them, that's enough to put it in production." That may be the killer app for the distiller.' So, is this guy all hype with overpriced devices, or is time for someone to take his genius (Segway aside) to the mass market?"

5 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Something completely different.. by cayenne8 · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    What the hell happened to my USER page?

    It has weird new formatting...post my last post in big text at the top of the screen? That can't be good for work usage...

    :)

    I cannot find a way to change it back to the simple mode of just a few minutes ago....anyone?

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    1. Re:Something completely different.. by Yvan256 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I have no idea, it's like someone at Slashdot figured out CSS a few weeks ago and keeps messing with everything since then.

      How about AT LEAST display the "your comments" tab by default instead of the "firehose" tab?

    2. Re:Something completely different.. by cayenne8 · · Score: 0, Offtopic
      "How about AT LEAST display the "your comments" tab by default instead of the "firehose" tab?"

      I'll second that one !! But really...if you're gonna screw around with the CSS...at least give the option in the preferences section to turn it off and back to 'normal'.

      Just more crap to mess up on an older laptop. I can't even view the idle pages...they are horrible looking on my firefox on an old mac....and when you try to post...the window to type in is about 1 inch wide...

      I can't even do the firehose anymore...

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    3. Re:Something completely different.. by prgrmr · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Myspace and Livejournal both recently reformatted their profile pages, so apparently the Powers That Be at Slashdot felt compelled to participate in a little Monkey see, Monkey do.

    4. Re:Something completely different.. by Loibisch · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      Yes, this is complete and utter bullshit. I thought it was greasemonkey acting up, but then I disabled it and wham, still looks ugly like hell. Great, now my user control panel looks like the ugly-ass idle pages.