5 ms·

"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." is bunk. People don't automatically adopt new better things. I don't know why though.

"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." is bunk. People don't automatically adopt new better things. I don't know why though. In my teens and twenties I collected ideas the way some folk collect stamps. The simple fact of the matter is that there are amazing things out there that you've never heard of, and no one really seems to care. (As an aside, I hate the question, "If FOO is so great why doesn't everyone use it?" I do not know. That's not my department.) These days some of these things are better known and some even have Wikipedia pages and stuff ( E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator ) but a lot of others are still obscure (trawl through Rex Research if you want to look for weird tech.) Like, there's a mechanism that can absorb kinetic energy. The demo has a little car on rails with a ramp at one end and a wall at the other. They put a wineglass at the wall and they put the car on the ramp and let it go: the glass shatters. They activate the device and repeat: car hits glass and halts, glass does not shatter. Messed up, right? They're from Poland IIRC, they've been doing demos at trade shows. I bet you've never heard of them. (Bug me and I'll try to dig up a link; They're in Rex Research.) I already mentioned the "Vaneless" ion wind generator, an efficient solid-state device for converting wind into electric power without e.g. killing birds with spinning vanes. Cheap, simple, easy, durable, been around for decades, and you just now heard about it, eh? :) There's a battery that desalinizes salt water. A nuclear reactor made of molten salt. Balloons stronger than steel. There's a guy in Michigan, Wally Wallington, who figured out how to move monoliths single-handedly, they walk just like the old stories say! Anyway, I'm getting ranty here. To veer back on topic: yeah, it's a bummer, you build an awesome mousetrap and even the people with lots of mice ignore it. I wish I knew what to tell you. Maybe paint it mauve?

andi999 6y ago
"The demo has a little car on rails with a ramp at one end and a wall at the other." any link for that?
- carapace 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-h56N_A3rY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-h56N_A3rY It's in Polish. They also drive a real car into one of these things set up as a bumper! News articles, links to more videos, patents, etc.: http://www.rexresearch.com/lagiewka/lagiewka.htm http://www.rexresearch.com/lagiewka/lagiewka.htm
  - andor 6y ago
    I think you fell for a trickster. "A small Fiat 126p, going 45 km per hour, was driven into a concrete wall. The bumper was not damaged. The driver wore no seatbelts. The inertial reaction, which should have thrown him onto the hood, did not ocur. The stopping distance was only 16 centimetres. Impossible? Yet hundreds of people in, and the stadium, and millions more on television. The use in all vehicles of the absorber of the energy, "Ecollision", can radically improve automobile safety." Regardless of the mechanism of energy absorption, if a vehicle is decelerated from 45 kph to 0 within 16 centimeters, there needs to be a way to remove the kinetic energy from the driver inside as well (seatbelts). If not, they will simply continue flying along at 45 kph, through the windshield. If the driver in this case was not wearing seatbelts, it's quite likely that the vehicle was not going that quickly. ``Lagiewka says, "The technical idea behind my buffer can be used in very many practical solutions. Another invention which I showed experimentally, is the brake. Connected to the axis on a Mercedes, the car stopped in one-quarter of the distance usually required".'' When braking, the limiting factor is usually not the brake mechanism itself (e.g. the disc brakes), but the interface between tires and the road. That's why cars have anti-lock systems.
    - carapace 6y ago
      > I think you fell for a trickster. It's possible. I certainly haven't tried to replicate the mechanism. In the video you can see the driver does experience "the inertial reaction" when the car halts, at least it seems to me that he leans forward due to inertia at that moment. I think that description is just bad. (Or, of course, it was just a weird hoax.)
      - andi999 6y ago
ricardobeat 6y ago
There are usually multiple sane reasons why these ideas don't make it; either technological, practical, business or social hurdles. Conformism is one of them. They aren't actually better than what they are going against until they overcome that, or offer some kind of massive advantage that makes it dumb not to switch.
- carapace 6y ago
  I've heard that, I don't buy it. I think we are just stupid and crazy. Biodegradable plastic has been a thing for over half a century yet the whole planet is choking on discarded plastic. Where's the sane reason for that? Cars! Cars aren't sane, we had to convince ourselves that they were though a deliberate campaign of domestic propaganda![1] Cars kill hella people (I don't have stats for the rest of the world but more Americans have been killed by cars than have died in all the wars we've fought!) And that's just the people that get hit. There's air pollution (car exhaust is a deadly poison) and tires are constantly wearing down and giving off vulcanized rubber particles. I won't deny their convenience, but you'll never convince we they're sane. Or my old pet peeve: refrigerators. They open like cabinets instead of like drawers. The cold air goes out, the warm air goes in, and you get to pay for the energy to cool it off. Why not make them like a chest of drawers? Sanity? I think not. [1] "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM) Replying here to the other fella: > The vaneless ion generator is >5x less efficient. C'mon, less efficient by what metrics? Total cost over the lifetime of the structure, including maintenance? Killing eagles? In re: Molten Salt reactors there's a old page[1] about Molten Salt tech in general that talks about reactors towards the end: > The second MSR was a civilian power plant prototype, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE)7. Hugely successful, it was ignored by the US Atomic Energy Commission (US AEC), which had decided to favor the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR). The Director of ORNL, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, pushed for the MSR, but was fired for his efforts 8. > 8. Pages 198 - 200, "The First Nuclear Era : The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", by Alvin Martin Weinberg (1994). I've read a longer history of Molten Salt reactors that described the events referenced in the above quote. Evidently both kinds of reactor showed promise early on (MS and LMFB) but for bureaucratic reasons the one was passed over for the other. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040602210408/http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/whatsMoltenSal.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040602210408/http://home.earth...
gdubs 6y ago
This is a great thread, thanks. Familiarity is a powerful thing. It helps explain why excel remains the most widely used “programming language” in enterprise. Part of it is habits, which are not easy to change. And the fact that when they are changed, it’s often incrementally, by substituting them with something similar enough. Thanks for the reminder of the amazing things that are out there, but just haven’t cracked the mainstream. I think about it a lot with software from the 90s. Things like HyperCard. Stuff that, despite lower processor rates and memory, seemed MORE sophisticated than a lot of what’s standard today.
- carapace 6y ago
  Cheers! And yes! HyperCard is a great example. Really picking on the IT industry is like taking candy from a baby, we're so woefully ignorant of our own prior art.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
>there's a mechanism that can absorb kinetic energy Yes, it's called braking.
hchz 6y ago
These examples provide your answer - digging just past the surface, they're not better at giving people what they want. The vaneless ion generator is >5x less efficient. Molten Salt Reactors, on the surface, sound quite safe, but nuclear power's primary problem is economics, and this is an unproven technology operating over the long time scales needed to amortize reactor construction costs. Nuclear power systems present novel failure mechanisms that don't exist in everyday technology, such as the corrosion mechanisms caused by coupling of mechanical, thermal, chemical, and radiological stresses, and MSR's present a new set of these that are poorly understood. Additionally, MSR's exhibit thermal shocks in normal operations orders of magnitude above what may be produced in a water-cooled reactor. It's just not that simple - it looks simple to you.
- monadic3 6y ago
  How can you speak so confidently for other people? It's just not that simple - it looks simple to you.
- Joker_vD 6y ago
  And yet the molten-sodium and molten-lead reactors, which sound quite unsafe, actually exist and used even today, since the seventies, actually.
  - hchz 6y ago
    Yes, they actually exist in the West as research reactors, since there has been no demonstration or certification of their suitability for long-term operation.
    - carapace 6y ago
      It seems to me like you're just being circular now, like you're saying "Sure, MS reactors exist, but we don't know if they are good because we haven't done the work to find out." Going back to the original article "Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?" we could ask "Why aren't Molten Salt reactors more popular?"

andi999 6y ago

"The demo has a little car on rails with a ramp at one end and a wall at the other." any link for that?

carapace 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-h56N_A3rY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-h56N_A3rY It's in Polish. They also drive a real car into one of these things set up as a bumper! News articles, links to more videos, patents, etc.: http://www.rexresearch.com/lagiewka/lagiewka.htm http://www.rexresearch.com/lagiewka/lagiewka.htm
- andor 6y ago
  I think you fell for a trickster. "A small Fiat 126p, going 45 km per hour, was driven into a concrete wall. The bumper was not damaged. The driver wore no seatbelts. The inertial reaction, which should have thrown him onto the hood, did not ocur. The stopping distance was only 16 centimetres. Impossible? Yet hundreds of people in, and the stadium, and millions more on television. The use in all vehicles of the absorber of the energy, "Ecollision", can radically improve automobile safety." Regardless of the mechanism of energy absorption, if a vehicle is decelerated from 45 kph to 0 within 16 centimeters, there needs to be a way to remove the kinetic energy from the driver inside as well (seatbelts). If not, they will simply continue flying along at 45 kph, through the windshield. If the driver in this case was not wearing seatbelts, it's quite likely that the vehicle was not going that quickly. ``Lagiewka says, "The technical idea behind my buffer can be used in very many practical solutions. Another invention which I showed experimentally, is the brake. Connected to the axis on a Mercedes, the car stopped in one-quarter of the distance usually required".'' When braking, the limiting factor is usually not the brake mechanism itself (e.g. the disc brakes), but the interface between tires and the road. That's why cars have anti-lock systems.
  - carapace 6y ago
    > I think you fell for a trickster. It's possible. I certainly haven't tried to replicate the mechanism. In the video you can see the driver does experience "the inertial reaction" when the car halts, at least it seems to me that he leans forward due to inertia at that moment. I think that description is just bad. (Or, of course, it was just a weird hoax.)
    - andi999 6y ago

ricardobeat 6y ago

There are usually multiple sane reasons why these ideas don't make it; either technological, practical, business or social hurdles. Conformism is one of them. They aren't actually better than what they are going against until they overcome that, or offer some kind of massive advantage that makes it dumb not to switch.

carapace 6y ago
I've heard that, I don't buy it. I think we are just stupid and crazy. Biodegradable plastic has been a thing for over half a century yet the whole planet is choking on discarded plastic. Where's the sane reason for that? Cars! Cars aren't sane, we had to convince ourselves that they were though a deliberate campaign of domestic propaganda![1] Cars kill hella people (I don't have stats for the rest of the world but more Americans have been killed by cars than have died in all the wars we've fought!) And that's just the people that get hit. There's air pollution (car exhaust is a deadly poison) and tires are constantly wearing down and giving off vulcanized rubber particles. I won't deny their convenience, but you'll never convince we they're sane. Or my old pet peeve: refrigerators. They open like cabinets instead of like drawers. The cold air goes out, the warm air goes in, and you get to pay for the energy to cool it off. Why not make them like a chest of drawers? Sanity? I think not. [1] "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM) Replying here to the other fella: > The vaneless ion generator is >5x less efficient. C'mon, less efficient by what metrics? Total cost over the lifetime of the structure, including maintenance? Killing eagles? In re: Molten Salt reactors there's a old page[1] about Molten Salt tech in general that talks about reactors towards the end: > The second MSR was a civilian power plant prototype, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE)7. Hugely successful, it was ignored by the US Atomic Energy Commission (US AEC), which had decided to favor the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR). The Director of ORNL, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, pushed for the MSR, but was fired for his efforts 8. > 8. Pages 198 - 200, "The First Nuclear Era : The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", by Alvin Martin Weinberg (1994). I've read a longer history of Molten Salt reactors that described the events referenced in the above quote. Evidently both kinds of reactor showed promise early on (MS and LMFB) but for bureaucratic reasons the one was passed over for the other. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040602210408/http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/whatsMoltenSal.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040602210408/http://home.earth...

gdubs 6y ago

This is a great thread, thanks. Familiarity is a powerful thing. It helps explain why excel remains the most widely used “programming language” in enterprise. Part of it is habits, which are not easy to change. And the fact that when they are changed, it’s often incrementally, by substituting them with something similar enough. Thanks for the reminder of the amazing things that are out there, but just haven’t cracked the mainstream. I think about it a lot with software from the 90s. Things like HyperCard. Stuff that, despite lower processor rates and memory, seemed MORE sophisticated than a lot of what’s standard today.

carapace 6y ago
Cheers! And yes! HyperCard is a great example. Really picking on the IT industry is like taking candy from a baby, we're so woefully ignorant of our own prior art.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

>there's a mechanism that can absorb kinetic energy Yes, it's called braking.

hchz 6y ago

These examples provide your answer - digging just past the surface, they're not better at giving people what they want. The vaneless ion generator is >5x less efficient. Molten Salt Reactors, on the surface, sound quite safe, but nuclear power's primary problem is economics, and this is an unproven technology operating over the long time scales needed to amortize reactor construction costs. Nuclear power systems present novel failure mechanisms that don't exist in everyday technology, such as the corrosion mechanisms caused by coupling of mechanical, thermal, chemical, and radiological stresses, and MSR's present a new set of these that are poorly understood. Additionally, MSR's exhibit thermal shocks in normal operations orders of magnitude above what may be produced in a water-cooled reactor. It's just not that simple - it looks simple to you.

monadic3 6y ago
How can you speak so confidently for other people? It's just not that simple - it looks simple to you.
Joker_vD 6y ago
And yet the molten-sodium and molten-lead reactors, which sound quite unsafe, actually exist and used even today, since the seventies, actually.
- hchz 6y ago
  Yes, they actually exist in the West as research reactors, since there has been no demonstration or certification of their suitability for long-term operation.
  - carapace 6y ago
    It seems to me like you're just being circular now, like you're saying "Sure, MS reactors exist, but we don't know if they are good because we haven't done the work to find out." Going back to the original article "Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?" we could ask "Why aren't Molten Salt reactors more popular?"