I need everybody’s help. I was selected as a finalist for the local science museum’s contest to identify the innovation that I would most like to see invented and create a small exhibit about it. I put in a huge amount of effort to make a very well researched and prepared presentation, and even built a kid-friendly museum exhibit and presentation to illustrate my idea. The winner gets a trip to Italy. But get this: it turns out the winner is going to be determined by an easy-to-game online poll. So I feel like an idiot for spending so much effort, because the person with the most Facebook friends is going to win. Please help me fight for justice for voting for my project. (It’s project #1). Update: Somebody was stuffing the ballot box, so they enabled some fig-leaf anti-cheating protections and reset the vote.
The convertible heel shoes are already a product. The company participated in the Mass Challenge startup competition last year. It is likely they have patents on it.
http://masschallenge.org/
http://www.convertible-heels.com/Day2Night.html
Also they are the dumbest invention, by comparison. It’ s a shame to even put them in that list.
Seems they were on Kickstarter too….
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2072356942/day2night-convertibl…
To be fair, the competition wasn’t necessarily to come up with a radically new idea, but simply to advocate for an invention in a way that will help museum-goers understand it.
Probably true.
That idea is so idiotic on so many levels, I’m amazed. Any women in the audience, to tell people why that is?
I wear New Rocks, I doubt I’m qualified to comment on that!
Ninjas, small and big, always get my vote.
You just haven’t realized yet that samurai > ninjas any day!
It depends. The movie law of Ninja states that one Ninja is invincible, while many Ninja are cannon fodder.
So one Ninja beats one Samurai, yet one Samurai can defeat a large group of Ninja and still be back in time for dinner.
But you see, the thing about the samurai is that they can be beaten once or twice, but they don’t die from that and they eventually learn one or another lesson and come back even stronger than before. Also, they possess a very specific skill that ninjas lack: they look good even when being beaten up.
I didn’t know you fancied Tom Cruise.
Shogun pawns both Samurais and Ninjas!
Muahahahaha
Hey, I never insulted you!
Tom did great as a Samurai and IIRC he survived while the rest all died!
Tom Cruise was terrible as a samurai.
He should stay away from period pieces. He is unconvincing as somebody who lives in the 19th century.
I still think it’s better to have him stuck in the 19th century running around pretending to be a Samurai than jumping on couches in the 21st.
There’s always the option of him running away from Martians in 21st!
Good call!
What about mid-20th? ;p (in Valkyrie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stauffenberg_and_Cruise.JPG )
I thought it was Pirates vs Ninjas?
Normally I roll my eyes at these kinds of posts. When I read the list, I was surprised that it was legitimately the best candidate. Solor paint was a close call but in the end, humanity would be better off with ninjas to keep our bodies in shape.
Maybe adapt them to counter the effects of 0 gravity on the human body?
ruined it for me by having a “tritanium battery”, he might has well have just put “copied off star trek” in the entry field.
The cars that convert to maglevs seemed interesting, but I voted for David’s nanoninjas in the end
These ideas are either silly or simply not achievable scientifically.
I guess I’ll vote for your idea because it’s the most sensible out of the whole bunch. Bare in mind though that this is not new, there’s lots of use currently going on regarding the involvement of nano robotics and its use in medicine.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/February/DNA-robots-des…
depends how massively your stretching the truth with your definition of nano-robotics.. hmm. a lab i used to work in worked on a lot of nano bioengineering projects
making nano wires with using wire shaped viral capsids as scaffolds, re-engineering more simple MS2 like viral capsids as drug delivery capsules, simple self assembling dna based circuits, re-engineered ribozymes and riboswitches as molecular circuit breakers and molecular sensors respectively. also, in another lab cancer cell target genetically modified viruses (as targetted chemotherapeutics basically) …afaik those types of projects are the nearest we are so far to even nanoscale ‘effectors’ let alone ‘robots’ .i’m not counting mutation enzymes with modified function either. as for anything afm, optical tweezer based or similar……….well make for some pretty demonstrations or some useful single molecule measurements, but again, different ballparks.
eric drexler has a lot to answer for! literal molecular scale repair robots, even for dna let alone anything else .not going to happen.. much more targetted medicines and repairs………..yeah, sure -10 to 20 years
EDIT
ps the work in that RSC link is very analogous to prostate cancer GIANT project utilizing engineered adenovirus to specifically ONLY target prostate cancer cells -a different approach but v similar result. Targetted aptamers conjoined to chemotherapeutic containing secondary aptamers domains (eg holding cisplatin analogues say) also achieves similar results
Edited 2012-12-02 22:19 UTC
Its an injustice that its called an injustice. Not funny enough to be satirical, not serious enough to be legit.
It is a little hypocritical to first whine about how stupid the voting system only to use your massive (relative to the other’s facebook friends) osnews crowd to “game” the poll in your direction. Surly by using osnews, the others don’t stand a chance?
Where’s the justice in that?
I hope everyone here will vote for the entry they feel DESERVES to win.
I would wish you good luck, but now you probably don’t need it
/Uni
Edited 2012-12-02 20:40 UTC
To be fair, he did say it was an easy-to-game poll.
Most of these polls are just a popularity contest…
“We’ll, a lot of contests are run on Facebook. Since I am interested in photography, I get messages about photo contests. Of course, when my Facebook friends enter a contest of some sort, they post a message about it.
What disturbs me is that with very few exceptions, the people who enter such contests send a message encouraging others to vote for themselves, not to look at the contest and vote for the best submission.
This is, by definition, corruption.”
Read more about it:
http://kallokain.blogspot.se/2012/11/is-facebook-corrupting-us.html
ninjas are losing to shoes (34% to 38%)
what a sad sad world….
Edited 2012-12-03 14:07 UTC
You better post a followup article with pictures of your Italy trip.
Of all the entries, only the pottery wheel for paraplegics and the interchangeable heel shoe seem actually practical to make, and of those only the pottery wheel actually seems to be doing something useful or interesting.
And apparently I’m the only person to vote for it.