 Idle
thoughts of a not so idle mind...
Electric Cars | High Rise
Fire Safety | Protecting Planes From Hijackings |
Eco-Friendly
Packaging
| 9/07. Why the resistance
to resistance? There are millions of people every day who are at the
gym riding tens of millions of miles on stationary bikes or treadmills.
Why don't they connect them all to electrical generators and create electricity?
Imagine the amount of energy that could be produced by several million
men (and woman) hours a day who are working at full capacity.. Then we
could create Personal Energy Accounts .com,
so that the energy created by each person is credited back to their energy
bills. Imagine recharging your own Hybrid car battery as you're getting
your daily workout? |
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9/08. Electric Cars.
A key problem with Hybrid / electric cars, the batteries need to be recharged
often. Doesn't a car going 60 mph effectively create a 60 mph wind resistance?
Then why not place several mini windmill type devices behind the front
grille and have them connect to a generator, which will repower the battery?
You may not recoup all of the lost battery charge, but you might significantly
increase the charge in the battery so as to add 40% - 50% to the battery's
ability to power the car? If a company could increase the power of a battery
that much they would make billions. Also, when going downhill or breaking,
instead of using break pads, why not utilize natural resistance (silimar
to wind or water power) so that breaking can be done by a generator that
itself generates electricity.
As solar cells are perfected
and have increased efficiency, why wouldn't they be placed on the roof
of every car and truck? UPS has clear roofs because the sunlight lights
up the interior, lets take it to the next step. |
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2/09. I'm clearly no genious,
but what's up with mirrors? Lighting.
If I aim a flashlight at a mirror, does it create double the light? It
illuminates the mirror and then sends it back and illuminates me as well.
What if I aimed it at 2 mirrors? What If I placed 1,000 tiny mirrors on
a ceiling and aimed a light at them, would the whole room light up? What
if I arranged a series of mirrors so that a light aimed at one of them
would effectively reflect that light to the next, and the next, and the
next, until it went full circle creating a constant ray of light? What
if there were solar receptors in each of them? Could we multiple the value
of that single ray of light by the number of mirrors? Is there something
we can do if they were all two-way mirrors. When I was a kid I used magnifying
glass to enhance the power of the sun to create an energy so great that
it started a fire. Isn't there some way we can use a series of mirrors
in concert with magnifyers to take the enormous power of the sun to create
an even more potent energy (or light) source? I told you upfront that I
was no genious. |
| 9/07. Protecting Airplanes
from Hijacking and Terrorist attacks. Unfortunately. Once again, call
me crazy, but aren't there a few ideas we haven't tried yet, other than
becoming a police state, frisking grandmothers, and confiscating shampoo?
(They win). When you go on a roller coaster, they lock you into the chair
don't they? Well how about a secure belt that locks you into your plane
seat? They only want 1 person at a time using the bathroom anyway, so let
one person out at a time. At least they can't overpower the entire crew
if only one person is allowed to get up at a time. What if the pilot could
view a live webcam of the passengars, and in the event of an "issue" could
dispense safe gas that could subdue everyone in the passengar cabin? Speaking
of webcams, why don't they have them to monitor the passengers and have
those images viewable on a website where airline security on the ground
can monitor the flights as well? Think that would have been helpful during
911? Taken a step further, enable US Military to actually take over command
of the flight controls from the ground, if a plane flies withing x many
miles off course, or in similar situations. We do this with towy planes,
we do this with the space shuttle, isn't acommercial airliner somewhere
in between these two? The pilot and the Gov would have to both punch in
the specific code for that flight in order for this to happen.. like we
do with our nuclear arsenal. Finally, some flights have US Mashalls in
them, some apparently more than one. When I go into k-mart, there is a
two-way mirror looking down on me. Why in the world isn't there a compartment
next to the Pilot cabin that can hold at least two grown men, with a large
two-way mirror looking out at the passengars? To a potential terrorist,
they would have to assume that there are two armed government marshalls
behind that mirror, watching them. How could they plan otherwise? I guess
the downside is that this would take up two seats that could otherwise
be sold. How about having the area leading to the pilot cabin having a
live taser connection that can be turned on and off at the pilots whim?
Why they place the bathroom so that people need to be right next to the
flight controls is a mystery to me anyway. How about "Stay the hell away
from the controls" in big red letters? I know, I know, some if not all
of these seem outrageous. But look at how outrageous things are now, how
many wasted man hours, security dollars, inconveniences, missed flights
and stress are we allowing to happen otherwise. I don't think we can stop
some fanatic from getting lucky and taking a plane down, but it seems to
me that there are a lot of things we can do to make sure they can't, more
importantly, use it as a weapon. |
9/07. Low Tech - High Rise
Safety. I remember my 1st job in Las Vegas, it was at the MGM Grand,
the day it reopened after
a horrific fire that took the lives of 84 people. I was always a bit
weary of going too high in a skyscraper, knowing it was clearly too far
up for any fire ladder to reach, as we learned a few years ago, much too
sadly.
| While not a perfect solution,
why don't we use gravity to our advantage? We have fire walls, fire stairwells,
why dont we have fire decks? Skyscrapers are built around other skyscrapers,
we call them cities. How expensive would it be to have a 6x6 fire deck
at emergency exists every 3 stories or so? You attach a cable from one
that extends to an adjacent building, 1-2 floors below. In the event of
a fire below your position in a burning building, with no means to escape,
you go to the fire deck, strap into your simple seat, and ride to the fire
deck of that adjacent building.
The decks would be designed
so that the connector wires between the two buildings we at an angle (floor
level) that would make for a safe, gravity driven ride to the other. Crazy?
Perhaps. But I can think of a few people who wish that had been an option. |
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| 9/07. High speed police
chases. Too many killed or maimed. I've been wondering about this for
years. In writing this, I see that there are some high-tech companies and
even the US
military working on ways to address this problem. But how high tech
do we need to go here? You can click your keychain and start your car.
Why don't we require automakers to install a similar system that turns
the car off? The cop aims his (or her) radar-gun type devise at the rear
bumper of any vehicle, and it turns the engine off. In places like California,
where the police helocopters have turned it into a sport, the roof of the
car could be the engine shut-off point. The breaks and power steering would
still work, so the danger factor can only be diminished, not enhanced.
I don't think we need NASA to fix this problem. For the civil libertarians,
there would have to be specific and justifiable circumstances where it
could be used. We can send a man to the moon, think we can remotely stop
a car? I dunno. |
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| A candle can burn for
hours. Cant they arrange magnifying glass with mirrors to increase
the illuminating power of a candle (or conventional lights) so that we
can gain the maximimum benefit from the minimum amount of fuel used? |
| Seatbelts on a
School Bus? What a strange idea. We spend millions warning drivers
about buckling up and the fines they can receive, but send our kids to
school in these speeding torpedoes without seatbelts. As
the NCSBS notes "There are an estimated 474,000 school buses nationwide......."
and
"an unrestrained body in motion continues moving when the vehicle it is
in abruptly stops. They know that when that happens, the moving body crashes
into things inside of the vehicle or is thrown out of it, often with deadly
results". Well let me suggest this;
I will pay my local school board the $.40 cents it would cost to screw
in a bolt at the base of the seat where my child will be sitting, and I
will invest the $10-$15 for a personal seat belt my child can bring with
them on the bus to attach to that bolt. Not the perfect answer, but better
than being thrown across the highway or being rolled over upon. |
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10/07. Dont make waves?
The Hoover Dam creates enough electricity to serve 1,300,000 people. Hydroelectricity
sounds like a pretty clean and efficient energy source to me. Unlike wind
farms, of which I take no position on here, you dont have to worry about
all those blades effecting your view of the land. But why settle for dams,
why not set these systems under the ocean? We have tens of thousands of
miles of coastline where the tide is perpetually either coming in or going
out.. with undefeatable force and magnitude both ways. Why cant we place
rows of watermills x many feet below the surface, creating an infinite
amount of clean, safe, cheap, renewable energy? There would be no need
to have the electrical devices or generators under water, only the pipe
or coils that would spin from the force of the water.. leaving the mechanics
and electrical on the shore.  |
| Wind or Solar ? Or Wind
AND Solar AND Hydro? Interesting newsweek
story regarding the chase to create batteries that can store more energy.
Story mentions how solar works better during the day (duh) and windpower
is more effective at night.
So I wonder, why not create
a rooftop solar panel that ALSO contains a wind power generation element?
Take the very lame animation to the right, what if every other panel housed
a tiny windmill unit instead of solar? Or maybe the entire unit shifts
down at night, so that the entire roof area exposes the windmill aspect,
only to slide up again at daybreak, so the solar panels are dominant?
Maximize solar and maximize
wind. Take it a step further and have both the wind and solar element so
they can rotate like a propeller, so that everytime it rains, you take
advantage of the water flowing down the roof and generate hydro power?
You could likely incorporate all 3 without having the roof appear any different
that with the solar panels alone... though that likely doesn't matter much
at night.. like the weatherman saying "clouds tonight".. ya, so.
I dunno. |
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| 9/07. Defeating IEDs.
It seems to me that some of the solutions to help protect our troops from
IEDs should not require billion dollar fixes. Instead if reinforcing the
bottom of the vehicle to help it better handle the explosion, why dont
they attach weighted balls, tires or some other device that ride a safe
distance in front of the vehicles, on spring mounted poles?
These could have sensors
to warn of explosives, or at the very least they could set the devices
off instead of the vehicle and our soldiers sustaining the blast. I don't
know, this solution would probably not cost enough to make them interested
in considering it. Better yet, why don't we pave the roads as we go? We
say we're helping reconstruct of the country, so by paving the roads we
can do just that and also protect agains IEDs. It's alot easier for the
enemy to bury IEDs in sand and cover it up without it being noticable then
it is to dig up a freshly asphalted road... or so one would think. |
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| Why Shovel? How about
a tarp that you place over your driveway before a snow or ice storm.. You
plug it in to an outlet, and it heats to perhaps 38 degrees, just enough
to make sure the snow and ice melts, only to float off to the side of your
yard or into the street. Gotta be cheaper than a snow plow, certainly cheaper
than a slip-and-fall lawsuit? |
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Cant we find a way to secure the beach umbrella?
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