God Awful Things

You know, there was a time when there was no such thing as wireless internet.. I remember when it gradually took off, I just couldn’t comprehend how it was possible.. Sitting there with a laptop, streaming tunes from a hard drive upstairs, and pumping them through the stereo.. it was Jetsons type shit.

Over at Wired there is a list of 100 things your kids (if you have them, or if you are one) will never know about, such as:

6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.

17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.

And so on and so forth.. Hell, I remember when we got our first 14.4 modem and could do some serious BBSing, assuming no one had to use the phone.  I think in 1995 when I went to college I got my first cordless phone, now its like “Home phone? WTF is that?”  My brother was talking to me last weekend about the will that we wrote up for our mother (around ’86) when we were kids, it allowed us to know where all her worldly possessions would go.

Naturally, I went for the jewelry, I just loved the colors of those semi-precious stones, my brother on the other hand made the bold declaration of our CD player.  I have probably bout 3 CD’s in the past 10 years, and zero of those in the last 7.. times change quick, I can’t imagine Blu-Ray will ever really catch on as streaming movies is right around the corner.

Anyway, its been a while since we’ve had something really mind blowing, where it will change things forever.. but imagine wireless electricity.. and imagine it’s only 18 months away..

Over at the Beeb:

The system is able to operate safely because the energy is largely transferred through magnetic fields.

“Humans and the vast majority of objects around us are non-magnetic in nature,” Professor Soljacic, one of the inventors of the system, told BBC News during a visit to Witricity earlier this year.

It is able to do this by exploiting an effect that occurs in a region known as the “far field”, the region seen at a distance of more than one wavelength from the device.

In this field, a transmitter would emit mixture of magnetic and potentially dangerous electric fields.

But, crucially, at a distance of less than one wavelength – the “near field” – it is almost entirely magnetic.

Hence, Witricity uses low frequency electromagnetic waves, whose waves are about 30m (100ft) long. Shorter wavelengths would not work.

Ok, that’s cool, didn’t wanna fry anyway.

Anyway, go over to that link, watch the videos, have your mind fucking blown, man.