In most transformers, you have a core made of silicon steel or sintered ferrite powder. A magnetically susceptible material that confines, directs, and contains the magnetic flux in much the same way (though less effectively) that conductive wires contain and conduct electric flux (current). The magnetic material is, more than the windings, what make transformers and inductors so freakin' heavy. The fact that designers and manufacturers continue to use such large and heavy components indicates that they're probably pretty useful to have.
What these guys are doing is building a large air-core transformer. You can gain a lot by making the two sides resonate with one another, but ultimately an air-core transformer is going to have big losses.
would be more efficient than your laptop's power pack.
Well, yes and no. The laptop power adapter changes AC line voltage to some DC voltage, which the computer the uses. It's a single conversion step.
Now consider wireless power. It isn't going to be coming like some aether from the walls - you're going to need to produce it somewhere, somehow, probably from AC line voltage via a, you guessed it, power adapter. So the 75% to 90% wireless transmission efficiency is on top of the efficiency of the power adapter used to create the wireless power in the first place.
A second consideration in either case is: where does the lost energy go? In the case of a power adapter for a laptop, it is lost almost entirely as waste heat. In the case of wireless, it is partly lost as heat (e.g., resistive losses in the coils), but a lot of it is lost as electromagnetic radiation. While I'm not one to harp on about "OMG, power lines cause cancer!", if all of us start pumping out tens of watts of electromagnetic energy, it's going to cause problems. The problems may manifest themselves as marginally increased cancer rates, but I worry more about the effect on all kinds of electronic equipment that wasn't designed to be immune to those kinds of power levels.
Second, what difference does it make whether you pay for your printing at the printer or in your tuition?
The difference is that tuition is a single lump sum, paid once per semester, that often isn't "real money" anyway. Often it's loans, or parent's money, or something else that isn't in the front of your consciousness. If it goes up or down, say, $100 to cover the cost of printing for a semester, you aren't even going to notice.
Paying for printing, however, is something you are confronted with each and every time you print. Over time, this constant reminder trains you to think twice before hitting print. In other words, it makes you take notice and adjust your behavior accordingly.
In as far as this tends to encourage thought and conservation, I applaud it.
Messner first summitted Everest without oxygen from the Nepalese side - the southeast ridge route. An account of that is in his book Everest: Expedition to the Ultimate. That was as a part of a larger expedition.
Later, so silence all who doubted that he had summitted without oxygen, he did the solo northeast ridge route from Tibet. This expedition is recounted in The Crystal Horizon.
His accounts in these books, more than anything else, has convinced me that all that time at high altitude has cost him more than few brain cells. The guy's fascinating, but a little off.
A problem with your teacher analogy is that a teacher is a whole and complete unit, concentrated and readily able to teach some number of students, even if it isn't the whole world.
When it comes to coffee beans, however, you have a teensy, tiny resource that is distributed all over the world. It would be like saying that the teacher's eyes are in Papua New Guinea, the legs on either side of the Urals, the hands in Africa, and the ribs scattered across the Americas. How useful is a teacher like that? Not very, unless you could collect all the pieces in one place.
If all the coffee beans were concentrated in one corner of one country already, and could be used to offset a significant portion of that corner, that would really be something. But in this case, even if each Starbucks reclaimed all their grounds and has a spigot that shot out pure Java biodiesel, just how much has that gotten us?
In the case of biodiesel from coffee grounds, the numbers are particularly bad. It's not even close to a 2% solution.
The authors estimate producing 340 million gallons/year of biodiesel this way. That's a little over 8 million barrels per year.
The problem comes when you compare that amount to the total annual consumption of petrodiesel worldwide, which is about 5 billion barrels. So this could displace, maybe, about 0.1% of petrodiesel in the world.
One must then offset that possible production against the additional cost in producing it - namely the energy needed to collect and transport the grounds someplace to be made into biodiesel.
One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place, and saving the diesel used in transporting the beans. (I don't advocate that personally, I'm just trying to make a point.) The article mentions that 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are produced each year. Those are produced mostly in the tropics and then transported by ship, air, rail, and truck to their destinations. The 340 million gallons of biodiesel the authors claim is reclaimable would work out to about one gallon of diesel per 50 pounds of coffee beans, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate of the plantation-to-cup transportation cost.
So, if one could extract all the potential biodiesel from coffee beans, it might be enough to offset the energy used to transport them in the first place. But that's about as far as it would get.
So, this new discovery ain't nothin', but neither is it much of anything.
I agree with your main point that the future of energy will be made up of many smaller sources rather than some as-yet-undiscovered silver bullet. But, as with a lot of things, it is necessary to take a cold, hard, calculating look at the numbers before latching onto something. In this case, the numbers are particularly bad.
They estimate producing 340 million gallons/year of biodiesel this way. That's a little over 8 million barrels per year.
The problem comes when you compare that amount to the total annual consumption of petrodiesel worldwide, which is about 5 billion barrels. So this could displace, maybe, about 0.1% of petrodiesel in the world.
One must then offset that possible production against the additional cost in producing it - namely the energy needed to collect and transport the grounds someplace to be made into biodiesel.
One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place, and saving the diesel used in transporting the beans. The article mentions that 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are produced each year. Those are produced mostly in the tropics and then transported by ship, air, rail, and truck to their destinations. The 340 million gallons of biodiesel the authors claim is reclaimable would work out to about one gallon of diesel per 50 pounds of coffee beans, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate of the plantation-to-cup transportation cost.
So, if one could extract all the potential biodiesel from coffee beans, it could be used to offset the energy used to transport them in the first place. But that's about as far as it would get.
So, this new discovery ain't nothin', but neither is it much of anything.
The DS has a decent screen, but I think I (and most everyone else) would start getting a headache in about five minutes if they tried to read lots of text on it. After five weeks, I'd be lucky to see anything at all!
I suppose it is probably a smaller footprint than three discrete radio chips put together. One usually gets better die-level integration than board level, and you can usually eliminate redundant functions that way.
Even if it were larger footprint, the fact that you could address and power just one chip rather than three would be a winning advantage on its own.
A related problem to the speed of memory access is the energy efficiency of it. In an IEEE Spectrum Radio piece interviewing Peter Kogge, current supercomputers can spend many times more energy shuffling bits around than operating on them. Today's computer can do a double-precision (64-bit) floating point operation using about 100 picojoules. However, it takes upwards of 30 pJ per bit to get the 128 bits of data loaded into the floating point math unit of the CPU, and then moving the 64-bit result elsewhere.
Actual math operations consume 5-10% of a supercomputer's total power, moving data from A to B is approaching 50%. Most optimization and innovation in the past few decades has gone into compute algorithms in the CPU core, and very little has gone into memory.
"It's rare in human history that a billionth of anything has been shipped by one company," said Logitech's general manager Rory Dooley. "Look at any other industry and it has never happened. This is a significant milestone."
In answer to a number of responses I've gotten so far, perhaps I should clarify what I meant:
I'm not advocating killing off Constellation, or that changing NASA's focus, yet again, would help in the grand scheme of things. I think space flight is really hot shit, and the stuff that NASA is able to pull off is downright mind-blowing.
What I object to is the notion that we need to look to Mars for a challenge to focus the national attention and spur innovation. Put a man on Mars and what do you get? Lots of pictures, lots of abstruse science, lots of jobs while the program lasts, and a whole lotta feel-good. You get side benefits at home, and technological innovation with on-Earth benefit, certainly, many of which cannot be predicted.
But couldn't you get much the same by instead tackling the pressing challenges of today, such as energy and climate change? It's less glamorous, but isn't it more necessary? Maybe it isn't a zero sum game - I would hope that you could do both.
There aren't enough challenges facing us already? Personally, fixing the economy, changing the entire world energy landscape, averting a global climate disaster, and avoiding WWIII will be quite enough to occupy and challenge us for the next decade.
For most, a 5Mbps cable connection is much much much more than they ever will (or can) use. The only thing that will drive high-bandwidth stuff like this is media.
Right. But if you can't even get a cable connection to the home, short of installing it yourself, why not lay in something that is, essentially, future-proof? Is it too farfetched to think that, in the near future, most people will do some streaming/downloaded media? In HD, even? Set-top boxes that do this sort of thing are already rolling out (Vudu, Roku), the XBox 360 does it, and some Blu-ray players and TVs are starting to incorporate it.
The fiber doesn't need to solely be for "The Internet." It can also be used for landline telephony and cable television. This is what Verizon's FIOS does, if you happen to be blessed enough to live in an area where they've rolled it out. What these guys are proposing are a way to meet Verizon (or whoever else) halfway in the rollout.
the key caveat with this news item is that, when you RTFA, you find that they are culling the results from "self-identified elected officials." So, anyone could take the test and, for a laugh, identify themselves as an elected official.
In other words, it is not the case that the organizers of this test randomly selected a cross section of the populace, got complete demographic information about them (including occupation) then had them take the test.
Books - now there's the clincher. With a internet-enabled XO (or any other computer), you can theoretically access any and all knowledge that's out there, including a whole lot of books (textbooks or other kinds). Now, if you had $199 to spend, could you buy enough books to give you the same variety of knowledge? Could you carry it with you as easily?
Ok, maybe you and your neighbor in the next hut get together - you buy some books, and he buys some others, and now you have access to both collections. But what if, one day you are interested in 19th century literature, and the next day introductory computer programming? Shall we ask a third neighbor to step in? What if you want to know what the latest commodity prices are, to figure out whether to sell your crop now or hold it for another week - what printed book would tell you that? Do you have access to today's newspaper in your village? Now, $199 dollars doesn't seem to go as far.
Scale it up to an entire country, where millions of dollars are available, and you can have a pretty good library that captures a good portion of human knowledge in books. But, now you have the problem of distribution - everyone from around the country has to come and get the books. There's also the problem that you only have or two copies of everything, so only one or two people at a time can access it.
Compared to roving on Mars, the Lunokhod program had lots of things going for it.
* The much shorter communications time, which someone else mentioned, allows near real-time operator control, so a rover can move faster and not so gingerly creep your way around. Being so much closer allows you to also use a less-powerful transmitter, or transmit more data at the same power level.
* Being so much closer to the Earth means that it is feasible to send a much larger and heavier rover using the same rocket.
* Being so much closer to the Sun means that there is vastly more energy available, even considering the state of photovoltaics in the 1970s. The Moon has no dust storms to obscure the panels, either. Because of its slow rotation, one has about two weeks of continuous sunlight to work with. (On the other hand, it also means that you need to build a rover that can survive for two weeks with no sunlight).
On the whole, I'd say that the success of Lunokhod 30-40 years ago shouldn't make the Mars rovers' accomplishments seem puny today. The environments and challenges of the two locations are distinct, so the comparison isn't appropriate. Perhaps it would be better to compare the progress that has been made for each location over that time.
How good were Mars rovers of that time compared to now? Answer: terrible. There weren't any Mars rovers until Sojourner in 1996.
How good are the lunar rovers of today? Answer: who knows!? There haven't been any since Lunokhod. There are a few in development, from governments and private groups, but none have launched or landed yet, and won't for years still.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that most livestock is raised through grazing. In some many places of the world this is so, but the vast, overwhelming majority of livestock in the world is produced in industrial feedlots. Unless you are some goat herder in Africa, chances are very high that the meat you bought at the supermarket was raised in a feedlot, eating corn and soy that humans could make other use of, rendered beef fat, ground bone meal, and god-knows-what-else. The shit produced in these feed lots, which could theoretically be converted into fertilizer or useful methane, is mostly collected in lagoons and left to rot. If more people in developed society cut back or gave up on meat, there would be more grains available to feed the rest of the world.
so while your basic premise that animals have traditionally had a symbiotic relationship with agriculture is true, it hasn't been the case for several generations.
For more on the topic, I suggest "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.
The major hospital where I work is still tied to pagers. They have a well-developed and flexible infrastructure built around them: calling a pager directly, numeric paging, text paging, etc. We like our pagers so much that, when we heard Motorola was discontinuing the model we use, we bought up all the available stock and stashed it away.
That stash won't last forever, though, so the communications guys are testing out replacement technologies, like cellphones and VOIP. They have yet to find something that provides the same kind of flexibility and ubiquitous service.
I guess we can blame apple for popularizing the whole iWhatever concept. Now, we have an ISP that has taken it one step further - iiNet. I can imaging the advertising slogans now: "Why get your internet service from just one puny i, we've got two!"
Perhaps it will become like razor blades. Will I soon get an iiiiiiSlurpie at the KwikEMart?
Mostly it is a testbed of the design and aeronautical controls. Looking at the movie's many exploded and shaded CAD views (nice touch, guys), it appears to have no cargo space whatsoever. It doesn't look to me like that's what they have in mind - they just want to show that the flight fundamentals of the design are sound. They can work on building a larger one for cargo and/or humans if they manage this first significant milestone.
Slashdot Mirror
In most transformers, you have a core made of silicon steel or sintered ferrite powder. A magnetically susceptible material that confines, directs, and contains the magnetic flux in much the same way (though less effectively) that conductive wires contain and conduct electric flux (current). The magnetic material is, more than the windings, what make transformers and inductors so freakin' heavy. The fact that designers and manufacturers continue to use such large and heavy components indicates that they're probably pretty useful to have.
What these guys are doing is building a large air-core transformer. You can gain a lot by making the two sides resonate with one another, but ultimately an air-core transformer is going to have big losses.
Well, yes and no. The laptop power adapter changes AC line voltage to some DC voltage, which the computer the uses. It's a single conversion step.
Now consider wireless power. It isn't going to be coming like some aether from the walls - you're going to need to produce it somewhere, somehow, probably from AC line voltage via a, you guessed it, power adapter. So the 75% to 90% wireless transmission efficiency is on top of the efficiency of the power adapter used to create the wireless power in the first place.
A second consideration in either case is: where does the lost energy go? In the case of a power adapter for a laptop, it is lost almost entirely as waste heat. In the case of wireless, it is partly lost as heat (e.g., resistive losses in the coils), but a lot of it is lost as electromagnetic radiation. While I'm not one to harp on about "OMG, power lines cause cancer!", if all of us start pumping out tens of watts of electromagnetic energy, it's going to cause problems. The problems may manifest themselves as marginally increased cancer rates, but I worry more about the effect on all kinds of electronic equipment that wasn't designed to be immune to those kinds of power levels.
The difference is that tuition is a single lump sum, paid once per semester, that often isn't "real money" anyway. Often it's loans, or parent's money, or something else that isn't in the front of your consciousness. If it goes up or down, say, $100 to cover the cost of printing for a semester, you aren't even going to notice.
Paying for printing, however, is something you are confronted with each and every time you print. Over time, this constant reminder trains you to think twice before hitting print. In other words, it makes you take notice and adjust your behavior accordingly.
In as far as this tends to encourage thought and conservation, I applaud it.
Well, there goes AAPL's stock price. Now the thinking on Wall Street will be that Steve Jobs is going to kick the bucket at any moment.
Correction:
Messner first summitted Everest without oxygen from the Nepalese side - the southeast ridge route. An account of that is in his book Everest: Expedition to the Ultimate. That was as a part of a larger expedition.
Later, so silence all who doubted that he had summitted without oxygen, he did the solo northeast ridge route from Tibet. This expedition is recounted in The Crystal Horizon.
His accounts in these books, more than anything else, has convinced me that all that time at high altitude has cost him more than few brain cells. The guy's fascinating, but a little off.
Slight correction: Jon Krakauer was sent by Outside magazine, not National Geographic.
"Touching the Void" was a book before it was a documentary.
Cue the Zombie jokes now...
Mmmmmm... brain jerky!
A problem with your teacher analogy is that a teacher is a whole and complete unit, concentrated and readily able to teach some number of students, even if it isn't the whole world.
When it comes to coffee beans, however, you have a teensy, tiny resource that is distributed all over the world. It would be like saying that the teacher's eyes are in Papua New Guinea, the legs on either side of the Urals, the hands in Africa, and the ribs scattered across the Americas. How useful is a teacher like that? Not very, unless you could collect all the pieces in one place.
If all the coffee beans were concentrated in one corner of one country already, and could be used to offset a significant portion of that corner, that would really be something. But in this case, even if each Starbucks reclaimed all their grounds and has a spigot that shot out pure Java biodiesel, just how much has that gotten us?
In the case of biodiesel from coffee grounds, the numbers are particularly bad. It's not even close to a 2% solution.
The authors estimate producing 340 million gallons/year of biodiesel this way. That's a little over 8 million barrels per year.
The problem comes when you compare that amount to the total annual consumption of petrodiesel worldwide, which is about 5 billion barrels. So this could displace, maybe, about 0.1% of petrodiesel in the world.
One must then offset that possible production against the additional cost in producing it - namely the energy needed to collect and transport the grounds someplace to be made into biodiesel.
One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place, and saving the diesel used in transporting the beans. (I don't advocate that personally, I'm just trying to make a point.) The article mentions that 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are produced each year. Those are produced mostly in the tropics and then transported by ship, air, rail, and truck to their destinations. The 340 million gallons of biodiesel the authors claim is reclaimable would work out to about one gallon of diesel per 50 pounds of coffee beans, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate of the plantation-to-cup transportation cost.
So, if one could extract all the potential biodiesel from coffee beans, it might be enough to offset the energy used to transport them in the first place. But that's about as far as it would get.
So, this new discovery ain't nothin', but neither is it much of anything.
I agree with your main point that the future of energy will be made up of many smaller sources rather than some as-yet-undiscovered silver bullet. But, as with a lot of things, it is necessary to take a cold, hard, calculating look at the numbers before latching onto something. In this case, the numbers are particularly bad.
They estimate producing 340 million gallons/year of biodiesel this way. That's a little over 8 million barrels per year.
The problem comes when you compare that amount to the total annual consumption of petrodiesel worldwide, which is about 5 billion barrels. So this could displace, maybe, about 0.1% of petrodiesel in the world.
One must then offset that possible production against the additional cost in producing it - namely the energy needed to collect and transport the grounds someplace to be made into biodiesel.
One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place, and saving the diesel used in transporting the beans. The article mentions that 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are produced each year. Those are produced mostly in the tropics and then transported by ship, air, rail, and truck to their destinations. The 340 million gallons of biodiesel the authors claim is reclaimable would work out to about one gallon of diesel per 50 pounds of coffee beans, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate of the plantation-to-cup transportation cost.
So, if one could extract all the potential biodiesel from coffee beans, it could be used to offset the energy used to transport them in the first place. But that's about as far as it would get.
So, this new discovery ain't nothin', but neither is it much of anything.
The DS has a decent screen, but I think I (and most everyone else) would start getting a headache in about five minutes if they tried to read lots of text on it. After five weeks, I'd be lucky to see anything at all!
Neither the article, nor Broadcom's product page, nor the product brochure pdf mention the package size. Any guesses?
I suppose it is probably a smaller footprint than three discrete radio chips put together. One usually gets better die-level integration than board level, and you can usually eliminate redundant functions that way.
Even if it were larger footprint, the fact that you could address and power just one chip rather than three would be a winning advantage on its own.
A related problem to the speed of memory access is the energy efficiency of it. In an IEEE Spectrum Radio piece interviewing Peter Kogge, current supercomputers can spend many times more energy shuffling bits around than operating on them. Today's computer can do a double-precision (64-bit) floating point operation using about 100 picojoules. However, it takes upwards of 30 pJ per bit to get the 128 bits of data loaded into the floating point math unit of the CPU, and then moving the 64-bit result elsewhere.
Actual math operations consume 5-10% of a supercomputer's total power, moving data from A to B is approaching 50%. Most optimization and innovation in the past few decades has gone into compute algorithms in the CPU core, and very little has gone into memory.
I think McDonald's would disagree with you.
In answer to a number of responses I've gotten so far, perhaps I should clarify what I meant:
I'm not advocating killing off Constellation, or that changing NASA's focus, yet again, would help in the grand scheme of things. I think space flight is really hot shit, and the stuff that NASA is able to pull off is downright mind-blowing.
What I object to is the notion that we need to look to Mars for a challenge to focus the national attention and spur innovation. Put a man on Mars and what do you get? Lots of pictures, lots of abstruse science, lots of jobs while the program lasts, and a whole lotta feel-good. You get side benefits at home, and technological innovation with on-Earth benefit, certainly, many of which cannot be predicted.
But couldn't you get much the same by instead tackling the pressing challenges of today, such as energy and climate change? It's less glamorous, but isn't it more necessary? Maybe it isn't a zero sum game - I would hope that you could do both.
There aren't enough challenges facing us already? Personally, fixing the economy, changing the entire world energy landscape, averting a global climate disaster, and avoiding WWIII will be quite enough to occupy and challenge us for the next decade.
Right. But if you can't even get a cable connection to the home, short of installing it yourself, why not lay in something that is, essentially, future-proof? Is it too farfetched to think that, in the near future, most people will do some streaming/downloaded media? In HD, even? Set-top boxes that do this sort of thing are already rolling out (Vudu, Roku), the XBox 360 does it, and some Blu-ray players and TVs are starting to incorporate it.
The fiber doesn't need to solely be for "The Internet." It can also be used for landline telephony and cable television. This is what Verizon's FIOS does, if you happen to be blessed enough to live in an area where they've rolled it out. What these guys are proposing are a way to meet Verizon (or whoever else) halfway in the rollout.
the key caveat with this news item is that, when you RTFA, you find that they are culling the results from "self-identified elected officials." So, anyone could take the test and, for a laugh, identify themselves as an elected official.
In other words, it is not the case that the organizers of this test randomly selected a cross section of the populace, got complete demographic information about them (including occupation) then had them take the test.
See also self-selection and selection bias.
Paper and pencils - a whole lot of both.
Books - now there's the clincher. With a internet-enabled XO (or any other computer), you can theoretically access any and all knowledge that's out there, including a whole lot of books (textbooks or other kinds). Now, if you had $199 to spend, could you buy enough books to give you the same variety of knowledge? Could you carry it with you as easily?
Ok, maybe you and your neighbor in the next hut get together - you buy some books, and he buys some others, and now you have access to both collections. But what if, one day you are interested in 19th century literature, and the next day introductory computer programming? Shall we ask a third neighbor to step in? What if you want to know what the latest commodity prices are, to figure out whether to sell your crop now or hold it for another week - what printed book would tell you that? Do you have access to today's newspaper in your village? Now, $199 dollars doesn't seem to go as far.
Scale it up to an entire country, where millions of dollars are available, and you can have a pretty good library that captures a good portion of human knowledge in books. But, now you have the problem of distribution - everyone from around the country has to come and get the books. There's also the problem that you only have or two copies of everything, so only one or two people at a time can access it.
Compared to roving on Mars, the Lunokhod program had lots of things going for it.
* The much shorter communications time, which someone else mentioned, allows near real-time operator control, so a rover can move faster and not so gingerly creep your way around. Being so much closer allows you to also use a less-powerful transmitter, or transmit more data at the same power level.
* Being so much closer to the Earth means that it is feasible to send a much larger and heavier rover using the same rocket.
* Being so much closer to the Sun means that there is vastly more energy available, even considering the state of photovoltaics in the 1970s. The Moon has no dust storms to obscure the panels, either. Because of its slow rotation, one has about two weeks of continuous sunlight to work with. (On the other hand, it also means that you need to build a rover that can survive for two weeks with no sunlight).
On the whole, I'd say that the success of Lunokhod 30-40 years ago shouldn't make the Mars rovers' accomplishments seem puny today. The environments and challenges of the two locations are distinct, so the comparison isn't appropriate. Perhaps it would be better to compare the progress that has been made for each location over that time.
How good were Mars rovers of that time compared to now? Answer: terrible. There weren't any Mars rovers until Sojourner in 1996.
How good are the lunar rovers of today? Answer: who knows!? There haven't been any since Lunokhod. There are a few in development, from governments and private groups, but none have launched or landed yet, and won't for years still.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that most livestock is raised through grazing. In some many places of the world this is so, but the vast, overwhelming majority of livestock in the world is produced in industrial feedlots. Unless you are some goat herder in Africa, chances are very high that the meat you bought at the supermarket was raised in a feedlot, eating corn and soy that humans could make other use of, rendered beef fat, ground bone meal, and god-knows-what-else. The shit produced in these feed lots, which could theoretically be converted into fertilizer or useful methane, is mostly collected in lagoons and left to rot. If more people in developed society cut back or gave up on meat, there would be more grains available to feed the rest of the world.
so while your basic premise that animals have traditionally had a symbiotic relationship with agriculture is true, it hasn't been the case for several generations.
For more on the topic, I suggest "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.
The major hospital where I work is still tied to pagers. They have a well-developed and flexible infrastructure built around them: calling a pager directly, numeric paging, text paging, etc. We like our pagers so much that, when we heard Motorola was discontinuing the model we use, we bought up all the available stock and stashed it away.
That stash won't last forever, though, so the communications guys are testing out replacement technologies, like cellphones and VOIP. They have yet to find something that provides the same kind of flexibility and ubiquitous service.
I guess we can blame apple for popularizing the whole iWhatever concept. Now, we have an ISP that has taken it one step further - iiNet. I can imaging the advertising slogans now: "Why get your internet service from just one puny i, we've got two!"
Perhaps it will become like razor blades. Will I soon get an iiiiiiSlurpie at the KwikEMart?
Mostly it is a testbed of the design and aeronautical controls. Looking at the movie's many exploded and shaded CAD views (nice touch, guys), it appears to have no cargo space whatsoever. It doesn't look to me like that's what they have in mind - they just want to show that the flight fundamentals of the design are sound. They can work on building a larger one for cargo and/or humans if they manage this first significant milestone.
The article didn't mention is, so I'll ask the crowd: does anyone know what the specific impulse of this device would be when completed?