Showing posts with label could. Show all posts
The laptop you could fry a steak on
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Usually, you want to keep laptops cool. An industrial designer comes up with an idea for one that does exactly the opposite.
Burgers and browsing. Dragan Trenchevski
Think "spam" and "laptop" and chances are good that the canned meat isn't going to come to mind. But if the laptop in question is the one dreamed up by designer Dragan Trenchevski, you might just want to bust out the oil and some onions.
Trenchevski has come up with a concept for a laptop-style cooking surface he calls the "Electrolux Mobile Kitchen." At first, it seems like a gag, but when you think about how convenient such a thing would be for camping or picnicking in the park, you kind of start to want one. I know I did.
Right now the Mobile Kitchen is just a concept, but Trenchevski has put a lot of thought into how it would work. When you lift the lid, you see a cutting board that lifts out easily thanks to a little fabric tab. The cutting board also contains a secret slide-out grater. Once the board is removed, you reveal an induction cooking surface. The surface would respond to differently sized pots or pans and only output the energy needed to heat their surface to save energy.
The lid itself is a touch-screen laptop which, Trenchevski says, could be used to stream cooking tutorial videos, look up recipes or Skype your mom to get help with a tricky dish. It would have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity as well as a camera, speaker and microphone. Hopefully it's also grease resistant because once that Spam gets frying, splatters can't be far away.
As an industrial designer, Trenchevski created a wide range of fun and practical design ideas while he was on the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at a university in Skopje, Macedonia, which you can check out on his Behance page.
The device when closed. Dragan Trenchevski
The cutting board. Dragan Trenchevski
The tech. Dragan Trenchevski
(Via Yanko Design)
Michael Franco Freelancer Michael Franco writes about the serious and silly sides of science and technology for Crave and other pixel and paper pubs. He's kept his fingers on the keyboard while owning a B&B in Amish country, managing an eco-resort in the Caribbean, sweating in Singapore, and rehydrating (with beer, of course) in Prague. E-mail Michael. See full bio Elon Musk thinks you could travel to Mars really soon
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The SpaceX founder hopes to put humans on Mars in the mid-2020s, but that's just the first tiny baby step toward creating his vision of a Martian metropolis.
This guy wants to send a million of us to Mars in the next century. Tim Stevens/CNET
We've been hearing from real-life Tony Stark inspiration Elon Musk about his hopes for sending humans to Mars for a few years now. But in a new interview, the SpaceX founder shares a vision that's far more grandiose than building a small base on the fourth rock from the sun. He envisions a Martian metropolis up and running within a century.
Previously, Musk has told journalists that manned missions to the Red Planet could be possible as soon as the mid-2020s, a pretty optimistic timeline when you consider that NASA is targeting the mid-2030s for such a mission and it took about a decade just for SpaceX to get to the space station for the first time. But in a fascinating conversation with Aeon Magazine, Musk dismisses such notions of pessimism (or realism, depending on your perspective and how many billions you have at your disposal).
"SpaceX is only 12 years old now," he said. "Between now and 2040, the company's lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people."
Musk says that first wave of settlers will have to pay their own way, probably to the tune of about a half million dollars each -- a migration he likens to those who saved up to pay for the treacherous voyage to the American colonies centuries ago.
Of course, the first few decades of attempted colonization of America's eastern shores were disastrous, as colonies were unable to support themselves in a foreign and unfamiliar land, but at least Jamestown and Plymouth had oxygen and water aplenty. What would it take to ensure a colony on another planet is both successful and sustainable?
Musk's answer is a bit of a stunner: He says it would take a million colonists. Even more mind-bending is the fact that, according to Musk's math, creating a city on Mars with more inhabitants than Austin, Texas, is achievable within a century's time.
He estimates that getting all those people and the cargo to support them to Mars would require "100,000 trips of a giant spaceship" from Earth. The rumor is that Musk is working on just such a colonial transport ship, and working out the logistics for such grand ambitions is built into the DNA of SpaceX, which is all about driving down the cost of space travel through reusable rocket technologies like the Grasshopper.
Not surprisingly, Musk's vision extends beyond Mars to other parts of the solar system. He imagines colonies on asteroids and on the more "welcoming" moons of Saturn and Jupiter, all centered around a new space economy that fosters our new multi-planet existence. The first step to achieving this in Musk's mind is to create a new Earth-to-Mars economy.
This vision might not be as crazy as it sounds when you consider that the colonization of the continent where I write from today was largely driven by a ravenous global search for things like spices, gold and silver. Keep in mind that at the time of Columbus, these precious items were largely just luxury goods -- humanity had not even begun to put them to use for more wonderful and practical things like dental fillings, electrical circuits or Sriracha.
But I wonder if this new interplanetary society and economy is further away than Musk believes. SpaceX seems to be succeeding in its quest to commercialize space travel, but its biggest client is not a large corporation looking to explore new, space-based business opportunities. Instead, it is me, my editor and a few hundred million other American taxpayers that fund NASA. So maybe SpaceX hasn't really commercialized space travel so much as it has just established itself as a reliable government contractor for the same old space program we've had for decades now.
I think my Martian condo and the Earth-to-Mars economy that will make it possible are a little further off than some billionaires would have you believe. What do you think? Let us know in the comments below or tweet @crave.
Eric Mack Crave freelancer Eric Mack is a writer, radio producer, and podcaster based in Taos, N.M., but he lives in Google+. He's also managing editor of Crowdsourcing.org and has written e-books on both Alaska and Android. E-mail Eric. See full bio