Thought 24: Never Give Up

A while back I was attempting, with my friend Jason, to make a working robot, with tracks. One day I got ambitious and got one whole side finished, mounted, and ready to go. Then powered it on to a glorious first run of about 20 seconds before the rivets busted the wood used for the tracks and the whole shredded to stop. Disappointed I moved on to other projects for a bit.

I came back to an older idea of just using wheels and a caster, a simpler idea but proven and sound. Now, I have completed the first step and just maybe the whole thing is starting to take shape again. Now we can being again to get something up and running, the first of the robot army.

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Thought 5 - The Ferengi of New Jersey

Just got back from a wedding in Jersey, and have determined that New Jersey has a lot going for it, and a lot of peculiarities to it as well. First the good: Mandatory recycling. Recycling is curb side and everything goes, this is a great benefit, as there are no third parties involved or hippies to worry about, everyone just recycles. Recycling also requires little effort on the user, plastic, glass, and metals all go in the same container, then paper products in another. Now the strange: Everyone drives everywhere, but there are lots of trees. Like a giant suburbia, where the trees have not yet been killed off by the logging industry. Now, having ridden my bike for most of my life, and having walked the dogs in the morning, I have become more aware of my sense of smell. And oddly New Jersey smells like conflict, the conflict between the cars trying to pollute the world and the trees absorbing that pollution and releasing oxygen. Quite and odd balance when the brain is in a toss...

Thought 16 - Kid Power

In response "Thought 14 - Perpetual Cat" sugarbumkin said, "The same theory could be applied to balloons tied to kindergarteners at recess. I like it." Well this got me thinking... Clothes with that are laced with MEMS generators. A MEMS generator is a solid state electronic circuit that generates low level of current though passive motion of the environment. Things like temperature change, acceleration, and even Brownian motion are converted to power using a MEMS generator. So, now we have attached them to small free moving bipeds of pure energy. How do we get the energy back. I figure that we isolate the playground into a large battery configuration where the children are running around on a conductive plate that makes contact with the heels of their shoes. They will run around with a super capacitor in addition to the MEMS, when their feet touch the ground the super-cap is discharged into the conductive plate underneath them. I do not think that the childr...

Thought 52: Coaster-less Beer Glass

It occurred to me last night while drinking beer that the coast was both irritating and waste of resources. Irritating that almost no glass actually lives on the coaster, preventing them from performing their original task of preventing damage to the table. And a waste that they get thrown away every night and in some cases every drink. So I dreamed up this: The glass has ridges to direct the condensation down to a reservoir at the bottom of the glass. The reservoir size will be base on the humidity and temperature difference of the beverage and the surrounding air. The reservoir can be drained by a couple of rubber plugs along the sides. The vary bottom of the glass is covered in a bit of rubber to prevent damaging the table from the hard glass. The interesting part is that the water will make the glass more stable as it is drunk by increasing the base weight. Cheers for your thoughts!

A Million Useless Thoughts

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