I made a lot of DK jokes after the Segway came out - I thought it was a solution in search of a problem, and its high price made it an expensive toy more than anything else. But I was impressed with his water purification machine last year, and I share his frustration* with much of our technological effort and spend going towards frivolous things.
* while recognizing that some of this stems from not being able to make even more money :)
Article ended just when it was starting to get interesting though.
His water purification system is really amazing. You would think that all of the 'help save the worlds poor' non-profits would be jumping all over it. Here's the Wired article from last year on it - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/
It costs WAY WAY too much. He "hopes" to get it below $2000, which means right now it's more than that. And after you read the $/L estimate, add in the cost of fuel and you'll see the device is not cost effective (when compared to other devices that do the same thing).
It would come down in cost with economies of scale, and improved production techniques, and... in 20 years, it would be out of patent.
I think there is a moral dilemma when someone creates something immensely valuable, but wants to be paid for it. But... wouldn't a world in which people didn't get paid quickly become rotten? And is it any different from people needing money for life-saving surgery (because the surgeons, hospitals and suppliers all want to be paid). See also the pied piper.
Factual content: there's a camping device for purifying water with ultraviolet light http://www.steripen.com/ but it just kills things, and won't remove salt or arsenic.
See, that looks cheap to me. DK claims 1000 liters/day for a cost of 0.2 cents/liter; let's be pessimistic and assume 500. (Maintenance would be my biggest worry, but let's keep it simple.)
Now if we take grinding poverty as a per capita income of $1/day and consider a village of 100 people, that means everyone in the village could have 5 liters of pure water a day at a cost of 1 day per week - a 14% 'tax' for 1 year.
That's a big economic hit for a very poor village, but it would not surprise me to find that such a village might lose more than 14% of its productivity to a combination of acquiring cleanish water and lost productivity due to water-borne diseases.
$5200 is not big bucks to us in the developed world. Surely it would not cost too much to buy 5 of them and do a year long comparison of 10 villages where half of them have the system and the other half serve as a control. Even if you add in setup costs the total bill for such an experiment would only be $75k.
To be fair, the segway wasn't the initial problem they were trying to solve. It was a byproduct of something larger. His team was working on a wheel chair called the iBot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT) while making the wheel base they realized it was fun on its own and expanded that idea to the segway. The iBot is actually trying to solve a real problem.
Comments
I made a lot of DK jokes after the Segway came out - I thought it was a solution in search of a problem, and its high price made it an expensive toy more than anything else. But I was impressed with his water purification machine last year, and I share his frustration* with much of our technological effort and spend going towards frivolous things.
* while recognizing that some of this stems from not being able to make even more money :)
Article ended just when it was starting to get interesting though.
His water purification system is really amazing. You would think that all of the 'help save the worlds poor' non-profits would be jumping all over it. Here's the Wired article from last year on it - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/colbert-and-kam/
Here's why: http://www.appropedia.org/Slingshot_water_purifier
It costs WAY WAY too much. He "hopes" to get it below $2000, which means right now it's more than that. And after you read the $/L estimate, add in the cost of fuel and you'll see the device is not cost effective (when compared to other devices that do the same thing).
According to here: http://www.ecofriend.org/entry/powered-by-cow-dung-slingshot... the system cost is $5200.
It would come down in cost with economies of scale, and improved production techniques, and... in 20 years, it would be out of patent.
I think there is a moral dilemma when someone creates something immensely valuable, but wants to be paid for it. But... wouldn't a world in which people didn't get paid quickly become rotten? And is it any different from people needing money for life-saving surgery (because the surgeons, hospitals and suppliers all want to be paid). See also the pied piper.
Factual content: there's a camping device for purifying water with ultraviolet light http://www.steripen.com/ but it just kills things, and won't remove salt or arsenic.
how is it superior to simple bleach based purification? http://www.survivaltopics.com/survival/better-than-bleach-us...
See, that looks cheap to me. DK claims 1000 liters/day for a cost of 0.2 cents/liter; let's be pessimistic and assume 500. (Maintenance would be my biggest worry, but let's keep it simple.)
Now if we take grinding poverty as a per capita income of $1/day and consider a village of 100 people, that means everyone in the village could have 5 liters of pure water a day at a cost of 1 day per week - a 14% 'tax' for 1 year.
That's a big economic hit for a very poor village, but it would not surprise me to find that such a village might lose more than 14% of its productivity to a combination of acquiring cleanish water and lost productivity due to water-borne diseases.
$5200 is not big bucks to us in the developed world. Surely it would not cost too much to buy 5 of them and do a year long comparison of 10 villages where half of them have the system and the other half serve as a control. Even if you add in setup costs the total bill for such an experiment would only be $75k.
To be fair, the segway wasn't the initial problem they were trying to solve. It was a byproduct of something larger. His team was working on a wheel chair called the iBot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT) while making the wheel base they realized it was fun on its own and expanded that idea to the segway. The iBot is actually trying to solve a real problem.