Slashdot Mirror
Company Creates a Self-Making Bed
MarkWhittington writes "A Spanish company has created a bed that will make itself. Ordinarily I am excited about just about any technological advance, but this one leaves me wondering what it's good for. It might be that as a rather slovenly housekeeper, I do not see the purpose of making a bed. The idea of being able to bounce a coin off of a sheet that has been stretched tight seems to have been an invention of moms and drill sergeants to torment people. Why make up a bed in the morning when it's just going to be unmade that evening (or sooner if one likes an afternoon nap?) When I was a lad, dreaming of the wonders that awaited in the 21st century, among the flying cars, colonies on the moon and jet packs, self-making beds somehow escaped by imagination, even as my sainted mom forced me to make mine before heading out to school."
A made bed looks better, giving the bedroom a more relaxing feel. It's also more comfortable to climb into and provides a consistent experience which many people need to help maintain sleep health.
Also because wife says so.
Subby is the author of TFA. TFA has the same text as the summary.
What's the point of that? I guess my own fault for RTFA.
Why not link to the company web page or press release or anything other than the same text posted here?
When I get out of bed, the first thing I do is make sure it is properly made...
Likewise, when I take off my shoes, the first thing I do is lace them up...
Screw the self-making bed, where's my AutoWash (tm) ?
While it's cool and I'm always excited about new advances in technology and robotics, this seems really limited. By the looks of it, you cannot move the pillows around during the night or have anything other than the sheet. All this really does is straighten out a single sheet onto the bed... not very useful or robust.
Still, I suppose every technology must have a first step, even the automated bed-making technology.
Making us lazier and lazier every single day!
Question:
Why make up a bed in the morning when it's just going to be unmade that evening (or sooner if one likes an afternoon nap?)
Answer:
To demonstrate to your future girlfriend that you aren't a slob.
"Ordinarily I am excited about just about any technological advance, but this one leaves me wondering what it's good for. It might be that as a rather slovenly housekeeper, I do not see the purpose of making a bed."
Some might like a bed to be made, and if that some are not young and able-bodied like you, then they would see a huge benefit to a self-making bed. Anyone with physical or mental impairments, the elderly, and professional caretakers of the aforementioned (think about orderlies in assisted living communities or hospitals having to make dozens or hundreds of beds a day) would probably see a benefit to a self-making bed that you likely wouldn't.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4181629.stm
What happens if you sleep in late ? Does the auto bed maker tuck you in like a mummy ? Could this be a future excuse of why we didn't come into work - "the automatic bed maker trapped me there all day".
Well... no. I don't make my bed often, but when I do, I spend better nights of sleep. I'm just too lazy.
I already have the problem of my cats jumping up on the bed and wanting to play when I try and make it. Sometimes one gets caught underneath and I have a bump crawling around.
The rail-guided mechanism which makes this bed work is utterly uninteresting, and probably won't handle custom bed coverings or multiple layers, like duvet with cover. The bed cover is permanently attached at the foot corners of the bed, and pulled into place by a mechanism moving on parallel rails toward the head of the bed.
The pillows are elevated by some mechanical lift, which allows the cover to slide under, and so the pillows cannot be moved arbitrarily.
This bullshit is less impressive than the machinery in bowling lanes for arranging the bowling pins.
OP is obviously single... Get married... Then you will learn about making beds... (Might learn about making babies too...)
Now all they need to do is create a seargant or bring back my late parents, so they can tell me I need to make the bed.
Clearly the poster doesn't have cats. Pulling up the bedspread once a day makes a nice, fairly hairball-proof protective surface.
Hotels could save money on housekeeping services, presumably.
Not that Spain needs to be cutting any more employment of course.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
You see, I grew up in rural South India and we usually slept on a mat (of reeds) unrolled on cement floors with a pillow and a sheet. In the morning we would roll our mats with the pillow inside and stack these rolls one on top of another in one corner of the room which doubled as living area during the day. All was well till I started reading the Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardener, which were very popular. In more than one novel the clue that unraveled the whole mystery was, "But the housekeeper said the bed was not made". I had no idea how one would make a bed. I had seen pictures of cots and mattresses and I knew most Americans slept on elevated platforms. I imagined most of them would buy it somewhere. How does one "make" it? Very frustrating.
In another novel the key was, "But the food was delivered by the dumb waiter!". I could understand if it was a blind waiter he would not have seen the dead body in the middle of the floor. But the waiter was just dumb, he could still see right? Then how delivering the dinner by dumb waiter made the difference? By the time I actually saw a dumb waiter, I had forgotten the story. All I remembered was, "why the dumb waiter did not see the dead body?".
Similarly in our first year in Chemistry, the book said some thing called an orbital was shaped like a doughnut. (yes, the Brit spelling). No one in our entire class had seen a doughnut. Then one student found an American book, that called it a donut but had a picture of it. Almost every one shouted, "donut is a torus!". We knew the mathematical name of that shape!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It appears that this unit requires that the sheets be affixed or neatly tucked in at the bottom of the bed. In that case, making it by hand is just as fast if not faster. (Although if you don't have a partner to help, you do have to make the effort of walking around to the other side of the bed once to pull the other side up.)
It doesn't look like it would work when the covers are pulled completely off. That's the only case where making a bed takes a little bit of time.
They don't say how this affects changing the sheets and pillowcases. If the pillows are attached to the bed by a cord, I imagine that task would be harder.
Finally, it's not clear that you should make your bed: http://www.healthandsoul.com/germ-hotspot-countdown-part-2.html "dust mites need humidity levels of above 50%. They will find it impossible to survive in the aridity found in an unmade bed. Made beds are said to give them the moisture that they need to survive." I'm having trouble convincing my g/f, though.
"I do not see the purpose of making a bed"
Read: forever alone
This is why we live in our moms basements, don't let the machines take their jobs they might discover what we do in the basement.
a "sleeping bag".
So many lazy and wife jokes. Ever consider that people with disabilities have a damned hard time with this task? All it takes is too much weakness in one limb to be able to lift a mattress, or the loss of a couple fingers (or even just their mobility) to be able to hold and pull a sheet. What a bunch of privileged chumps. I mean, if YOU don't need it, no one else possibly could, right? >.>
It took me a while to understand what "self-making" means here, and in that while I was cogitating why the hell would someone build a von Neumann machine in the form of a bed.
Ezekiel 23:20
In a properly made bed, the humidity from sleeping in it is preserved for much longer. That gives nice cozy conditions to everything from mold and mites to bed bugs.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Gentlemen! A toast!
To wives and girlfriends: May they never meet.
Except perhaps naked between the sheets.
Stay thirsty, my friends.
Submitter is also the author of the blog post linked within.
Guess someone found a great way to get page hits without having to actually write anything worthwhile: Just Slashdot it!
What a douchebag...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"Don't carry the ball like a loaf of bread".
I was totally dumbfounded. I had no idea what I was doing wrong. If I had a loaf of bread, it would be in a plastic bag and I wouuld hold it by the loose end. This was nothing like carrying a football.
It was phys ed, and the flow of the day didn't allow me to ask for clarification. Years later I learned that "like a loaf of bread" was a common coaches idiom for carrying the ball too far away from the body, too loosely so that it might get sripped by a defender.
Now as an added bonus, you need to understand that this is an American football I'm talking about, and that balls do not wear clothing.
I think it was Winston Churchill who said that the Americans and Britons are "divided by a common tongue". Same goes for any other place in the world where "English" is spoken.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Not one comment in this thread addresses the most important question regarding this issue.
If the bed makes itself, who has to lie in it? Does it lie in itself? How would there be any room for me?
... I guess now they have to sleep in it?
Practical reasons:
1) So you knock some of the skin-flakes, hardened secretions and creepy-crawlies that feed on them out of the bed. Insects poop you know. Even the small ones. Sleeping in skin flakes, hardened secretions and insect poop is unlikely to positively impact your health.
2) Making the bed every day builds discipline, which is helpful in many areas in life.
Aesthetic reasons:
1) Airing out the bed in the course of making it will make the bed smell better.
2) And, having a nicely squared away bed looks better to many.
Now all they need to do is...
Invent a machine that can clean up and dispose of kitty litter.
A machine that can take out the garbage, and intelligently put appropriate recyclables in the applicable receptacle.
One that can vacuum the entire house, including stairs, and empty its own canister when full. Oh, and it has to be able to pick up things that aren't supposed to be on the floor and put them away.
A machine that can take clean clothes out of the dryer, and fold and put them away for you. Ideally also put them in the washing machine in the first place during the day while you are at work so that you aren't competing with practically every other person on your floor for a machine in the laundry room.
Something that automatically can take clean dishes from a dishwasher and put them away.
A machine that cleans bathrooms. Another one that cleans the kitchen.
Then, and only then, will machines have genuinely freed me from household drudgery.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
When I was a lad, dreaming of the wonders that awaited in the 21st century, among the flying cars, colonies on the moon and jet packs, self-making beds somehow escaped by imagination, even as my sainted mom forced me to make mine before heading out to school.
"The inventions of the future include labor-saving devices that would not necessarily be valuable to individuals of the gender role I was socialized into. Ergo, these labor-saving devices are worthless."
Makes perfect sense to me.
you make your bed to keep the creepy crawleys out of it!
even the cleanest house in the south can suffer from an infestation of brown recluse spiders, which love to hide in crumpled up fabric. Saw a missionary with one that bit him on his ankle when he pulled his pants up off the floor, damn near lost his foot to the nasty bite. from that day forward all of my laundry was on a hook or in the hamper and my bed was always made!
you don't lose all the nuts and bolts from the engine you're rebuilding on it.
Y'all need a new wife. And you can't have mine.
. . .he's already had her.
(diving for cover, grinning like hell. . . )
Why make a bed? Why have a bath when you're just going to stink again in a few days. Why lock up your house when you're just going to have to unlock it to get back in? Why have children when they're just going to die (eventually). Why grow food if someone is just going to eat it? Sheesh. You are a slob.
Anybody else hear that in their head?
I hope it turns out to be like The Fifth Element. I want a bed like that.
The good news is, my dream-bachelor-pad is s-l-o-w-l-y becoming reality: there are paper (disposable) dishes, robot vacuum cleaners, and now this.
The bad news is, we'll have to look at the "Elderly couple dies of starvation, trapped in perfectly made bed" stories now and then.
Slashdotters!
As a certified male, chauvinist pig I have experienced the thrill of clean, ironed sheets, installed fresh every day. Of course such a life also assures that I will be a bachelor from time to time and then the bed gets made every year or so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeqB0hqUyw
In my younger days, I worked maintenance on a vacation resort. By maintenance, I mean mostly janitorial.
All it takes to have one's delusions about the cleanliness of the fairer sex shattered forever is walking into a womens' bathroom before it's been sanitized.
With fire.
It was the only way to be sure. ...But seriously, I never encountered feces in weird places in the men's room.
How the hell do you even get it on the ceiling? Not sure if impressed or terrified.
This seems a very good example of Chindogu.
Well done.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The reason why? I'm sensitive to temperature variation, and it's easier to get my blankets/sheets over me evenly so I don't have cold feet or a cold ankle or knee or thigh or whatever when they were at least nominally "made". When I don't make the bed, it's harder to get the even temperature coverage and that bugs the hell out of me.
... They call that "a maid" or "mom" in some cases ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I concede the rest.
If you have a self-making bed, then you no longer have to worry about your wife/girlfriend/mom's requests to make your bed. One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind!