1 million views on my Youtube Channel
My Youtube channel, just surpassed 1 million video views.
I posted my first video Why 88% of Ideas Fail to Make it to Market on February 11, 2008. Since then I’ve posted a total of 30 videos but by far the video with the most views was Why We Don’t Have Flying Cars, Yet.
My channel is now receiving over 100,000 views per month so the second million views should happen in less than a year. To celebrate 1 million views and to help get more views I’m making Predictive Innovation Core Skills: Inversion available for free.
Zero Mines, cheap-low-tech land mine clearing tool
Zero Mines is a group of people worldwide working on Open Source solutions for clearing land mines so people can grow food, travel, and live safely. Here is my suggestion.
Over 100 million land mines have been deployed around the world. Most of the places where these land mine are located are impoverished. The area that needs to be cleared is vast. The ideal solution would use cheap, easily available materials, that can be put together by anyone so that local people can quickly clear their own land.
The standard military approach to clearing a mine field is to use a heavily armored vehicle with a motorized flail to trigger the landmines. Armor is one way of staying safe while detonating a mine but not the only way. Distance is another.
A strong rope is cheap and can pull a heavy object across a mine field from a distance to detonate any mines. But you typically must go forward into a mine field. So how can you pull something towards you without first putting it in front of you? There is a very simple way.
The device I described fits those requirements. It is just a big rake rotating on a pivot pulled by a rope or cable from a safe distance to trigger mines.
1. place the pivot
2. pull the rope or cable from a safe distance or behind sand bags
3. sweep the rake over area to be cleared
4. move pivot / rake to cover more area
5. repeat
Dragging an object a distance from the arm would reduce the damage to the arm but even if the arm is damaged it is cheap and easy to replace. This might not be enough for all uses of the land or all types of land but can quickly clear an area for human travel and light use. If you need to go deeper use a heavier object and tines to dig up the ground.
3D modelling as easy as playing with dolls
This simple device will change the world! It’s an essential step to breaking down the barrier to robotics, 3D printing, and 3D media.
This action figure allows anyone with a computer and free software to create 3D animations. Move the arm of the doll and the arm on the screen moves the same way. This is the most intuitive way to work.
Powerful low cost computers and free software have enabled anyone to produce media as good or better than professionals. Even though the basic tool are available to anyone, 3D modeling has remained too difficult for most people because it required specialized skills to draw the models. A literal hand-on user interface bring 3D modeling to anyone.
The difficulty of 3D modeling isn’t just a problem for media it limits the progress of 3D fabricating like 3D printing and CNC. If you can literally move objects you can focus on the results instead of how to communicate with the computer.
Using a computer allows you to do many things you can’t just by hand. You can work on objects much smaller or larger than you could in real life. You can record the movements then edit those movements later or make small adjustments . After recording the movements you can play them back or direct robot / printer / CNC machine to perform the task. And the machine can do it much faster or slower than you can manually do. This opens up vast possibilities.
Simple intuitive user interfaces combined with exiting robotics will change the world.
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