A better way to turn waste lumber into a usable product. Currently, we can make particle board and similar stuff. What I want is a big vat you dump all the waste wood chips and horticultural waste into from which is extruded normal-looking, normal-quality boards, planks, panels, and other solid wood products. It would be like 3d-printing real lumber, but faster. And maybe you could use it to custom-extrude things like base boards and crown molding with no sawing or routers involved.
Except for the less noise part, that’s pretty much how every commercial restaurant dishwasher I’ve ever seen works. I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen conveyor versions. You load up a tray of dishes, and it gets the hell washed out of it in about 30 seconds or so.
Of cours,e if you google them, they cost way more than you’d ever want to spend.
Yeah, but I want a trayless version, where you just put the dishes on a belt-like thing at one end and remove them at the other.
Well, I mean I personally am not in the market for such a thing, but it would be so much better than what most kitchens have. What fucking good is a dishwasher when you have to clean the dishes already before you put them in?
This sounds like you’re describing some kind of H.R. Giger-styled gestation process.
Depends how you make sure access to essential public services, shops and entertainment is there from the start. Our postwar new towns, and the city of Milton Keynes, didn’t do too badly.
Or you slot developments like these into existing urban networks.
The Dutch in particular have a track record in building whole new communities on reclaimed polder land:
Silent Velcro. I’ve been saying this for years, there’s a fortune to be made.
Trivial, I know, but the question as phrased encourages the trivial: Why can’t a ball/strike machine be invented for major league baseball? It seems easy for me, who has no technical ability, to imagine some system that would recognize some matter inside a baseball that passes at some point through the strike zone. I might suggest implanting a detector just below the surface of home plate, and stripes on every batter’s uniform ( knees and letters) that likewise can detect this matter. If both detectors agree that the ball has passed through the area defined in both the “High/Low” and “Over the plate” sectors, then it’s a strike. This really seems technically feasible, eminently so. Or is the problem that they just don’t want to institute this sort of detector.? It seems simple enough to me. If we can put a man on the moon…
A machine that can create a garment straight from thread. It would consist of fifty or a hundred little guide rods that would chain-weave the thread into cloth under the control of a computer, which would be programmed to guide the weaving process to form a complete, seamless garment that could be removed from the machine upon completion and donned by the person for whom it was constructed (assuming there was no need to add features like buttons to finish it). It would be able to cleanly unite the narrow strips of cloth it initially generates as part of the extended weaving process (combine the strip edges into the ongoing weave).
It’s actually no more top down than what we have now. We are currently stuck with our residential-only zones surrounded by big-box complexes and resultant dying malls and dead and/or tourist trap main streets because of top-down zoning regulations and, IMO, poorly designed municipal tax structures, in which property taxes are based on real-estate value rather than resource usage.
I’m not talking about some anti-car place rife with meandering bike paths either. You can get a desired effect with appropriate mixed use and mixed-age zoning, à la Jane Jacobs, which would probably, at the same time reduce obesity rates and improve health and fitness levels.
The “faux-village” life doesn’t have to be a cheesey replica of some village and it can be very modern and high-tech
Another vote for batteries. There are several areas where battery tech could really change things. Examples include:
Utility level storage. Size and weight doesn’t matter as much. Mainly need improved economics plus fast switch time from charge to discharge.
Home storage for people with solar or whatever. Probably needs a better energy density than the above. Plus the switch time has to be good.
Transportation. Much reduced weight and size, better energy density. Plus faster charge time. It’d also be nice if they weren’t so explody. Easier swap out once the pack goes south would also be nice but that’s a car rather than battery engineering problem.
Devices like phones and laptops. While reduced size and weight would be nice, holding a bigger charge is the main target. (Again, with not being so explody.)
The technology for the first is not going to intersect much with the last. One of the big overall dreams is to not rely on scarce/expensive ingredients.
There’s a bunch of YouTube channels that routinely tout the latest and greatest breakthrough. But I’ll only believe a breakthrough when it’s selling in mass quantities. Going from the lab to the market is hard.
(I have a neighbor who had a device with a lithium battery that actually went explody. Due to the legal issues, who pays?, and the cleanup they were out of their home for 9 months.)
The history of car-centric suburban development is complete “top-down social engineering”, which more-or-less worked for the intended purpose (moving people out of cities and spreading out industry to make a more difficult target for strategic attack) but has now become massive uncontrolled sprawl that is a pervasive environmental catastrophe and aesthetic blight. Medium density mixed use development has actually been broadly successful when laid out with thought and input from residents, as evidenced by Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, et al, and is actually the traditional mode of urban development in pre-industrial cities that didn’t just default to building tenements or shanties because of geographic or economic limitations.
One point of note is that it is a mistake to try to create a pre-planned “faux-village life”, and instead create conditions through well-considered and flexible mixed-use zoning, traffic management, access and services, and set-asides for public spaces which encourage entrepreneurship and business development, allowing neighborhoods to naturally evolve rather than just constructing buildings with first floor shops, upper floor regimented housing, and plenty of underground or large aboveground car parks to essentially make a park-mall-suburb agglomeration that superficially seems like mixed use development but is actually just corporate rent-seeking .
Milton Keynes is a reasonably good example, but I’d point to Copenhagen or (redeveloped parts of) Amsterdam as a good model of integrating livable spaces with commerce and recreational ‘third space’ areas with good public transit, bike/walk access, services that preclude the need for multi-vehicle households.
Stranger
That’d be great. Until they invent that, consider getting some noise-cancelling headphones.These aren’t just hearing protection earmuffs from the hardware store. They use electronics to negate the sound. If you haven’t tried them, they can virtually eliminate the kind of loud, white-noise that a vacuum produces. They will have bluetooth, so you can even listen to something. They are also great on an airplane. It’s surprising how much more relaxing it is to fly in silence compared to the constant roar of the plane. Electronic stores like Best Buy may have demo stations where you can try them out to see first hand what they are like.
Really, wholly-automated tailoring should be a thing.
Some kind of laser grid thing that scans you head to toe, and produces an accurate 3D rendering, and all associated sizes, which feeds an automated machine to produce clothes to order. Even if it’s traditional cutting and sewing, but automated, it should be possible.
It already mostly exists. Pretty much every game these days has a camera in the outfield bleachers that’s zoomed in on the home plate area and has a strike box overlaid on the screen, so we can clearly see when a ball is inside or outside the strike zone as it crosses the plate. Add in a top-down view so the computer can clearly determine when the ball breaks the plane of the strike zone (so the right frame of video from the outfield camera can be reviewed), and it should be trivially easy for a computer to make a strike/ball determination.
…and now that I’ve gone looking for more information, I see that in the past couple of decades there have been some attempts at implementing automated strike/ball determinations. The most recently developed system might have a shot at widespread implementation:
(don’t worry about the preview, the link takes you to the “Enforcement” section where automated ball/strike systems are discussed)
It ought to be possible now to make some sort of laser-holographic optometry scanner that can image the back of your retinas and back-calculate exactly what lens prescription you need for focused vision.
We have these https://mushroompackaging.com/
We’re getting there… Blood substitute - Wikipedia
They exist; check out the pictures in the article! Human trials of artificial wombs could start soon. Here’s what you need to know
This exists Anti-Graffiti Coating | Sherwin-Williams
This exists. I don’t know the manufacturer but in Germany they have these. I was visiting a friend and after a meal I started to help clean up. Was rinsing the dishes before putting them in the washer. He told me to stop, said “just put them in. Unlike in the states, appliances in Germany work!” He was right.
Technology has nothing to do with why we don’t have this. As you say, it would be trivially easy to implement. The baseball powers that be don’t want to implement it.
It’s a good idea, though, because it adds another layer of safety. A person would have to forget to put the wrist strap on the baby AND forget the baby in a hot car on the same day.
If they were available when my son was a baby, I would have bought one.
Human behavior is like a pressurized gas seeking cracks in the vessel. If there is the narrowest edge-case avenue by which to fuck a thing up, someone somewhere will find it. Followed by lawsuits.
Yes, 100% biodegradable packaging is within reach, but not quite yet for everything. Governments and industries need to incentivize the switch. With ongoing research, technological advances, and large-scale investment, we could see significant movement toward 100% biodegradable packaging in many areas within the next few decades. It’ll take collaboration between industries, governments, and consumers, but it’s definitely a future worth striving for.
Anything that can help slow down or reverse our descent into the current Holocene extinction event is worth pursuing.
There have actually been programs on the market for 30 years that will generate patterns for custom fitted clothes. Plug that into a laser cutter with a fabric feed, and robot sewing and you would have it.