Revolution Door - revolving door that harnesses human activity for energy use.

[Dover]

Fly wheel captures energy on the fly, through human activity. This is just the tip of the iceberg on conserving, collecting, transforming and distributing energy from human activity.




The Revolution Door technology can be used with any new or existing revolving doors. At its core, it contains three parts – a redesigned central core replacing that of any existing or new revolving door, a mechanical/electrical system that harnesses human energy and redistributes electricity to an output, and an output device that maps the harnessed energy. The revolving doors in large office buildings are always in use at any given moment during the day and by capturing that kinetic energy this project can provide free electricity to the installation site...>

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/02/07/generate-energy-with-fluxxlabs-revolution-revolving-door/#more-8262



Fluxxlab

http://www.fluxxlab.com/projects/

[GliderGuider]

1. I wonder if it captures enough energy over its lifespan

to repay a profit on the sunk energy cost of its manufacture?

I really wonder if that deck chair might not look better if we moved it over there?

[Dover]

3. Now, now...why so glum?

We need innovation, and whether or not this particular widget proves feasible, it might generate 100 other ideas, some of which will be very important.

If you don't see a future, might as well exit the planet now...cause it's gonna be a rough ride.
But don't drag everyone down with you.

[GliderGuider]

5. Oh, I have lots of optimism

It's just that none of it revolves around widgets. Cleverness got us into this mess, so cleverness is unlikely to get us back out. That will take wisdom, not widgets.

[Dover]

7. Well not to get into semantics, but what do you feel is the source of that wisdom?

And where will it lead us?


I agree that cleverness without wisdom is a dangerous thing, but I don't think wisdom is exclusive of cleverness. It just comes from a different source.

[GliderGuider]

9. The best commentary I've found so far on wisdom

I posted this a few days ago on this thread.

A professor named George Mobus at the University of Washington, who works in artificial intelligence with a sideline passion for "evolutionary, cognitive neuropsychology" wrote the following. I think it's one of the best discussions of the biological nature of wisdom I've ever seen.

For many years I have observed the foibles of humanity in something like disbelief. My main question has been: If we are so smart, why is the world the way it is, and seemingly getting worse? I discovered that intelligence is not the key. Nor is creativity. These are the main cognitive facilities that have been rapidly evolving in Homo sapiens for the past 100,000 years or so (see reference list links from above URL). In my studies I ran across several references to the psychology of wisdom which I found intriguing and followed. In a nut shell here is what I have discovered.

Homo sapiens is misnamed. I now think that humans did indeed evolve a capacity for higher moral judgment based on two key elements of what I now call sapience. The difference between wisdom per se and sapience is that the latter is directly tied to brain functions of the prefrontal cortex, whereas wisdom also relies on internalizing the lessons of life experience. The two are strategic thinking and systems thinking. The former can briefly be described as the ability to coordinate one’s life with the world, including other humans. The latter is the ability to comprehend causes and effects through dynamic systems relations — to see the world as a whole and understand the interconnections between seemingly disparate objects and processes.

But the evolution of that facility was just getting purchase (through, it turns out, the advent of grand parenting) and was finding selective value in terms of family and tribe and territory when an explosion in cleverness (the combination of intelligence and creativity) led to agriculture and a complete restructuring of social needs. What had been a growing reliance of wisdom (generally described in the psychology literature as tacit knowledge used to make moral judgments in complex social problems) to govern the life of a tribe was irrevocably altered. The needs of villages and farming (e.g. location protection) put more emphasis on the more aggressive and manipulative aspects of human nature. The Machiavellian was selected for from that time onward. And wisdom (sapience) has taken a back seat ever since. While systems thinking has still been needed it tends to be restricted to solving local technical problems rather than global social problems.

The end result is that today we are a species that should be called Homo calidus (man the clever) rather than sapiens. I submit that the problems we are facing are due to an incomplete or minimal competency in sapience. Our brains are simply not sufficiently developed, on average, to develop the wisdom needed to base good judgments on global issues. None of the current batch of world leaders and none of the wannabe’s currently running for US president display any great signs of wisdom in my view.

That doesn’t mean that the genetic basis for sapience is not still in the species extant today. There is sparse evidence that some individuals still possess at least the genetic propensity for sapience such that if the behavioral traits associated with sapience were of selective advantage then it is conceivable that over a span of, say 10,000 to 1M years a new, robust species of humans might emerge that would be better equipped, mentally, to be the basis of a new civilization with a new capacity to understand the consequences of their integration with the natural world. I have christened the new species Homo eusapiens — man the truly wise.

Regardless of whether the capacity for wisdom is genetically mediated or not, wisdom seems historically to have had much less survival value than simple cleverness. It's horrifyingly ironic to see how the tables have now turned - that the pro-survival trait of cleverness that was so strongly selected is now sealing our fate, while the less useful trait of wisdom, that was largely shut out in the selection sweepstakes, now holds the key to our (and possibly the planet's) survival.

[Dover]

10. Yes natural systems derived from a non-dualistic experience (rather than intellectual & objectified

understanding) of the world. The ancients were probably closer to this holistic integration than we, however I feel we've needed to create a certain autonomy or dualism in order, perhaps to develop the "I" or as Jung called it "Individuation". This newly developed vantage, this dualism, from which we are evolving into a nondualistic (holistic) 'wisdom' is happening pretty quickly, whether you approach it from a purely biological, psychological, scientific or spiritual position. And since the reality or realm of nondualism is not linear, perhaps we can leapfrog that 10,000 - million year evolutionary scenario and get right to the good stuff. The ever present NOW.

But this discussion is probably getting way too offtopic.

[phantom power]

11. I have a couple observations...

1) "Internalization of life experience" requires... life experience. Which is to say, a lifetime of screwing up. The ones who survive the ordeal we call "wise."

2) George Mobus appears to pin his hopes on something very similar to what you pin your hopes on: that humans will learn some kind of "lesson" from what's coming. Although I'm already on record as being skeptical about that idea, I think Mobus is farther out on a limb than you are: he actually seems to think that evolution favors the kind of wisdom that he wishes we had more of.

His hypothetical homo eusapiens is quite antithetical to how evolution works.

Going back to (1), if there is any selective advantage to "wisdom," it comes from two pragmatic things: the first is living long enough (i.e. increased lifespan), and the second is being able to pass on any accumulated knowledge. That is to say, culture.

Maybe what he really wishes for is that those damn kids would pay more attention to their elders. Lord knows I wish that. Several times every day. But listening to elders trades off against creativity. And creativity, whether I like it or not, does have selective advantage. Both in terms of adapting to changing environment, and competing against other members of one's own species.

My kid scares the pants off of me. She is smart, but not wise. But she is the world's experiment made flesh, like each of us who came before her is an experiment. If she always paid attention to me, she would not be quite as effective an experiment.

I don't really know what I'm getting at. But I'm going to post it anyway. Natural selection does not select for systems-thinking. As a search strategy, it is too greedy for that. It has no lookahead.

We are going to live or die by what our culture can learn about systems thinking, and internalize.

[GliderGuider]

12. It's the obvious correctness of your comments that's at the root of my pessimism.

Wisdom might have some survival value in a low-intensity hunting-gathering environment. Maybe in that environment it acted as a surrogate for large-scale scientific knowledge. Cleverness is certainly a big-deal survival trait. but as I've said before, in an intelligent predator at the top of a planetary food chain, one that has systematically eliminated all opposition to its own growth, the previous value of cleverness suddenly morphs into a fatal liability. In the absence of any external limits, and lacking the internal self-restraint that comes from wisdom, we are likely to tinker ourselves right out of the web of life, and take untold other species along for the ride.

Can our culture learn systems thinking to the extent that it embraces voluntary limits to its growth? How much time do we have left before the bell rings?

[phantom power]

13. Homo sapiens is about to have a "life experience."

The kind where you wake up naked in a Mexican prison, face down in a pool of your own bodily fluids. If we survive it, we might call ourselves "wise" (until the next experience).

I have about a Planck hope. Because the wunderkinder over at the Santa Fe institute are developing the tools for understanding these sorts of systems problems. Sort of like having a proof that "a solution exists," without an actual algorithm for deriving that solution.

I wish I could live long enough to see what happens. I'll only see the opening act. And that's guaranteed to be bad.

[wellstone dem]

2. what a great idea

need to make sure the energy saved is worth the energy used in manufacture, but is on the right track.

[Dover]

4. Appreciate your attitude. Now THAT's usable human energy...positive energy.

That will take us much further than a drag on our efforts from negativity.

True these things need to be looked at holistically to gauge the overall merits, but
using human energy like this is just in its infancy.

[zalinda]

6. Why are people hooking up all these

exercise machines to produce energy? Damn, some of these places should be producing energy to be sold. Hook up those bikes, those tredmills, those stair steppers, make the place glow.

zalinda

[Dover]

8. Lol.......ain't it the truth. Gosh, thinking treadmills & flywheels probably had their

beginnings back when donkeys or slaves spun the wheels that drew water from a well, or raised the stones, etc. Hmmmm....stairstepper...treadmills....slaves... jackasses....hmmmm..deep :think:
Talk about revolving doors.....now that's full circle.