Tuesday 6th January, 2009
Plugging the energy/creative gap
Issue #1396 [Feb 15th 2008]
We are using electricity like it's some kind of magic. Take these powered projector screens. Next time you see one being deployed at the start of a lecture quietly hum the Thunderbirds theme tune to yourself for an easy giggle. Can't the man just wind it down? Are we really that lazy? Apparently so. We are a generation (see what I did there?) who want electricity more than ever before so that we can power-up our PDAs and be as cool as Jack saying things like 'upload it to my PDA' and so that we can spend so long playing computer games we end up strafing down the street and ducking behind cars. Who wants real life when in virtual reality you get to blow people up, drive fast cars against the traffic, and conquer the world?
We want electric toothbrushes, electric shavers, electric can-openers, electric doors, electric windows, and electric music. We want our mobiles to be able to take video footage, our vehicles to park themselves, our kitchens to order our food for us, our toasters to give us the weather forecast, our curtains to draw themselves, and our lighting to know what we are feeling. I mean, there are some people who even find it necessary to install lights and touch-screen DVD players under their cars just because they can. At least we aren't still making very, very small calculations on our digital watches. We want every conceivable function crammed into everything we own because, well, you know, why not?.
So, given that we are doomed to extreme laziness wherever possible, under the excuse of an 'increasing pace of life', and an obsession with anything vaguely electric, especially if it has blue LEDs on (blue LEDs can make anything cool), we must be creative in our generation of electricity in the future. So lets think about some highly practical and yet for some reason unexplored territory, shall we? How about the piezoelectric crystal? Squeeze it and you get electron juice. Now that is magic. Why are the roads not paved with them? Why aren't the soles of my shoes made of them? Who knows, I mean, look at her: she has diamonds.
How many times do you flush the loo in a day? Let's install some poo-powered hydro plants in the sewer. How about lemmings? According to stereotypes, a highly reliable source according to Felix, they regularly jump off cliffs, sometimes several times before breakfast. Think of the waste of potential energy there. Phenomenal.
All that breathing you are doing? Let's have wind turbines installed in our teeth. So you'll sound like one of those people that paint themselves silver, stand on a box and move like a robot for the entertainment of all that pass by, but at least you will be able to increase the charge in your mobile by an extra bar after a long run. Then you can take half a picture of that funny thing that you saw with the 5 mega pixel camera that was absolutely so cool last week.
Maybe you would even dare to aurally communicate with another human being on that contraption, but it would be much more amusing to make it predict precisely which seat you are sitting in in lectures using the power of satellites.
There are solutions all around us and both the NIPL (National Institute for the Protection of Lemmings, who are doing good work running Gravity Awareness Schemes and installing trampolines at the base of cliffs the world over) and myself fear it will come to using them unless we start doing things manually. Any self-respecting bloke will tell you that manual is better than automatic, we just need to persuade people that this is true for stuff other than cars.
We want electric toothbrushes, electric shavers, electric can-openers, electric doors, electric windows, and electric music. We want our mobiles to be able to take video footage, our vehicles to park themselves, our kitchens to order our food for us, our toasters to give us the weather forecast, our curtains to draw themselves, and our lighting to know what we are feeling. I mean, there are some people who even find it necessary to install lights and touch-screen DVD players under their cars just because they can. At least we aren't still making very, very small calculations on our digital watches. We want every conceivable function crammed into everything we own because, well, you know, why not?.
So, given that we are doomed to extreme laziness wherever possible, under the excuse of an 'increasing pace of life', and an obsession with anything vaguely electric, especially if it has blue LEDs on (blue LEDs can make anything cool), we must be creative in our generation of electricity in the future. So lets think about some highly practical and yet for some reason unexplored territory, shall we? How about the piezoelectric crystal? Squeeze it and you get electron juice. Now that is magic. Why are the roads not paved with them? Why aren't the soles of my shoes made of them? Who knows, I mean, look at her: she has diamonds.
How many times do you flush the loo in a day? Let's install some poo-powered hydro plants in the sewer. How about lemmings? According to stereotypes, a highly reliable source according to Felix, they regularly jump off cliffs, sometimes several times before breakfast. Think of the waste of potential energy there. Phenomenal.
All that breathing you are doing? Let's have wind turbines installed in our teeth. So you'll sound like one of those people that paint themselves silver, stand on a box and move like a robot for the entertainment of all that pass by, but at least you will be able to increase the charge in your mobile by an extra bar after a long run. Then you can take half a picture of that funny thing that you saw with the 5 mega pixel camera that was absolutely so cool last week.
Maybe you would even dare to aurally communicate with another human being on that contraption, but it would be much more amusing to make it predict precisely which seat you are sitting in in lectures using the power of satellites.
There are solutions all around us and both the NIPL (National Institute for the Protection of Lemmings, who are doing good work running Gravity Awareness Schemes and installing trampolines at the base of cliffs the world over) and myself fear it will come to using them unless we start doing things manually. Any self-respecting bloke will tell you that manual is better than automatic, we just need to persuade people that this is true for stuff other than cars.
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