5 ms·
Those pieces of furniture are glorified fly and mousetraps (really really cool ones...), why is the author of this article so disturbed by them? Personally I w
by burgerbrain 16y ago
Those pieces of furniture are glorified fly and mousetraps (really really cool ones...), why is the author of this article so disturbed by them? Personally I would find the idea that my house has enough mice to keep my coffee-table well-fed far more disturbing than my coffee-table eating mice.
- tomjen3 16y agoI find it more disturbing that your coffee table needs energy at all.
- burgerbrain 16y agoWell, if you could somehow get more energy out of it then maybe you'd be able to get it to preform some other tasks. Of course there aren't many tasks a coffee-table might preform, and there certainly aren't (enough? D:) mice in my house to keep it fed, but the idea is sound enough. Perhaps some sort of fancy bird-feeder that eats squirrels...
- krakensden 16y agoNow, that bird-feeder idea has a market. I know some people with bird feeders and a deep, uncompromising hatred of squirrels.
- cgs1019 16y agoWhat if it were charging your laptop/phone a la power mat?
- Kadin 16y agoThe coffeetable doesn't strike me as practical but I could see an insect-eating lamp being useful outside. You'd probably have the same issue as most "bug zappers" do, namely that they kill more beneficial insects than harmful/annoying ones, but perhaps it could be tuned to kill mosquitoes? A mosquito-killer that powered itself (and didn't require propane or CO2 or electricity, as most current ones do) would be pretty cool.
- maxharris 16y agoThe mousetrap table disturbs me. They've got a right to make and sell it, but I won't buy or condone it. That's because it causes too much pain on the animal's part, with not enough gain on the human's. Just look at another, more detailed picture of the design: http://dvice.com/archives/2009/02/mousetrap-table.php http://dvice.com/archives/2009/02/mousetrap-table.php Clearly, this thing goes beyond a sensible mousetrap, which is something that acts quickly and is not designed to celebrate death. Before you start to think that I'm some kind of nutty animal rights/eco person, I should say this: animal research makes human life better (by making us more knowledgeable about all kinds of things, from neurophysiology to pharmaceuticals to cosmetics), and they usually get anesthesia while we're doing it. I'm all for that. Likewise, eating (large, edible) animals is awesome because they taste good, improving the human gain enough to justify killing them. But powering furniture with mice? It's legal (and must remain so, or we lose the legal right to use animals for the aformentioned proper uses), but not ethical.
- burgerbrain 16y agoEh, I can't imagine it's much worse than those sticky-traps. At least with this you're not just throwing the corpse away though.
- thret 16y agoIt seems to me that putting the death of an animal or insect on display, as entertainment, is also unethical. I don't like the idea of people cheering for the guillotine.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- maxharris 16y agoI gave you a point, but I don't have a problem with being nasty to insects.
- khafra 16y agoWhat do you think of people who keep pitcher plants in their homes? The larger ones trap cockroaches, small lizards, and even mice in a slippery sap, slowly digesting them over the course of days.