More from my favorite Satanist has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

My Favorite Californian Inventor has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

The Best (Fan Made) Hockey Video Ever! has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

One part macelet... one part mace... ARGH! has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

How Vincent Dooly starts his day... has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'mother of invention, macelet, invention, inventor' to 'mother of invention, macelet, invention, inventor, andrew bowser' - edited by eric3579

Like I said in my first post above my little brother is a professional magician who designs a lot of these tricks and devices for TV shows. All I can say is you'd be amazed the lengths a magician will go to just to make a simple looking trick work. I think you'd be fascinated by it all.

The Magic Circle is a good organisation to join if you have an interest in magic. You need to be able to perform magic and be interested in learning how to do more, but that's all part of the fun.

An interesting aside about magical devices, they are never patented, as patent applications have to be made public. This means the devices themselves tend to be pretty expensive as the inventor may have only a short period of time in which to sell his idea before others start joining in. Simple magical effects (just the method for a trick printed on a piece of paper) can sometimes sell for hundreds of pounds. Everything about the magical world is strange and different. If you've got a keen mind and the technical know-how there may be gold in them thar hills for you

My friend actually filed a patent for this exact system back in 2004, right down to the OLED visors: http://goo.gl/LfDDos

However, the cost of retaining a lawyer and the patent office's recurring fees and drawn out review process bled him dry. Just as he was getting close to finally registering it he fell on hard times and had to put the process on hold. As a result, his patent went into the public domain after 18 months. He was heartbroken and still is, especially now that this video is being shared everywhere.

As much as I love this idea and want to see it become a reality, I can't help but feel like this company got at least some of the details they needed from my friend's patent. It pisses me off that our copyright system screws over small inventors and gives those with plenty of money a free pool of research and hard work.

I used to be a pretty strong "doubter", if not a denier. I made a gradual shift away from that, but one strong instance of shift was when Neil Degrasse Tyson presented it as a (relatively) simple physics problem in his new Cosmos series. Before we started burning fossil fuels, x% of the sun's energy was reflected back into space. Now, with a higher concentration of CO2, x is a smaller number. That energy has to go somewhere, and at least some of that is going to be heat energy.

Still, I don't think that anything on the level of "average individual citizen/household of an industrial country" is really where anything needs to happen. Yes, collectively, normal people in their daily lives contribute to Climate Change. But the vast majority of us, even as a collective single unit, contribute less than industrial / government / infrastructure sources.

Fossil fuels have been a great source of energy that has massively contributed to global advances in the past century. BUT, although we didn't know it in the beginning, they have this associated cost/downside. Fossil fuels also have a weakness in that they are not by any means inexhaustible, and costs rise as that becomes more and more obvious. In turn, that tends to favor the status quo in terms of the hierarchy of industrial nations versus developing or 3rd world countries -- we've already got the money and infrastructure in place to use fossil fuels, developing countries can't afford the costs.

All of this makes me think that 2 things need to happen:
A) Governments need to encourage the development of energy sources etc. that move us away from using fossil fuels. Tax breaks to Tesla Motors, tax incentives to buyers of solar cells for their homes, etc. etc.
B) If scientists/pundits/whoever really want people to stop using fossil fuels (or just cut down), they need to develop realistic alternatives. I'll bring up Tesla Motors again for deserving huge kudos in this area. Americans (and in general citizens of developed countries) have certain expectations about how a car should perform. Electric cars have traditionally been greatly inferior to a car burning fossil fuels in terms of living up to those expectations, but Tesla threw all that out the window and made a car that car people actually like to drive. It isn't just "vaguely functional if you really want to brag about how green you are", it is actually competitive with or superior to a gas-engine car for most users/consumers (some caveats for people who need to drive long distances in a single day).

We need to get more companies / inventors / whoever developing superior, functional alternatives to fossil fuel technologies. We need governments to encourage and enable those developments, NOT to cave to lobbyist pressure from big oil etc. and do the opposite. Prices will start high (like Tesla), but if you really are making a superior product, economy of scale will eventually kick in and normalize that out.

Outside of the consumer level, the same thing goes for actual power production. Even if we did nothing (which I would certainly not advocate), eventually scarcity and increased difficulty in obtaining fossil fuels (kinda sad that the past 2 decades of pointless wars 95% driven by oil haven't taught us this lesson yet, but there it is) will make the more "green" alternatives (solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, whatever) more economically practical. That tipping point will be when we see the real change begin.

My hope is that this will take the form of progressive revolutions. When the food and energy start to become scarce people might start to recognise that the ONLY people who can get us out of this mess are engineers, inventors and scientists.

Maybe we will even be smart enough to put them in charge and ditch the whole idea of politics for the sake of politics all together.

A man can hope anyway. The alternative seems to be extreme left and right wing movements fighting over metaphorical ash and bones.

Co2, methane and other undesirables in the atmosphere could probably be shifted if there was a concerted global effort, doubly so if we factor in 50-100 years of technological advancement. I'm sure the task would be herculean but it would probably also be the greatest thing we ever achieved as a species! ("screw your ancient wonders, we built an air scrubber the size of Missouri!")

Here's the video from the inventors YT channel: *related=http://videosift.com/video/Carpool-Deville

I guessed from the outset that this was one of those 'inventions' asking for 'investors' on one of those kickstarter type sites that allows the 'inventor' to keep the money even if the venture fails (or never gets started). If that's the case (I'm just guessing) then these WERE successful, as they got tons of investment but will never have a product.

That's true for a post industrial POV.
When machines already exist, and you just need energy to get things moving.

The energetic concerns of bygone eras were :
Whale oil, and later kerosene. For lighting. (note: back then, a day's work would only buy minutes of light)
Firewood, and later coal. For heating.
Manpower was the only energy user when it came to food production.

Early machines such as the combine were horse drawn, and did not need an energy architecture in place. (ignoring "food" as an energy)

Later machines used steam power, and hence could piggy back on the already existing wood/coal energy architecture (in turn stimulating it to grow larger).

Once the machinery industry was established, and the revenue generation was in place, it was possible to invest in improvements and alternative energies - ultimately leading up to oil burning machinery being common.

In any case, historically, industrialization drove the energy industry. (As it should, why have an industry to produce a product (energy) that isn't needed?)
And industrialization depended on a conducive society. A place where an inventor could own his invention, and could sell it, allowing things that were no more than ideas or garage trinkets to transition into products - which in turn place demand on other resources such as [forms of] energy.

In the past, there was nothing, so everything was build from the ground up. Industries grew out of nothing, they weren't established up front.
Modern times are different, where you have investment capital from entities who's entire existence revolves around investing, and you can front the establishment of an industry in the calculated hope of future demand.
(Granted, lords/aristocrats had a hand in industrial investment. Just not the kind or scale that you can see today.)

What you say applies a bit later, when industrialization was already well under way. Like when Thomas Edison used investment capital to fund power plants and an electrical network, in order to power the first [practical, but not 'first'] light bulb in New York.

-scheherazade

Here's a first hunt from nanalyze...
http://www.nanalyze.com/2014/03/will-bloom-energy-ipo-in-2014/

Likes been said time and again and as many a hopeful maverick has experienced before, the major hurdles are gas and oil and electrical concerns whose interest and prime motivation is business as usual and being the only show on planet. All these concerns have to do is send out a few lawyers, private thugs with Halliburton silver attaches filled with threats and cash and the shit disappears, as well as the inventor sometimes...

Actually, at the end she says; "since our report first aired in Feb 2010." Which would suggest that this is an update.
PS; Love the inventors enthusiasm. For him, and indeed all concerned, I hope it is a huge success because maybe we can then rip down the awful blight - and sheer waste of space and money - that are wind turbines.

This one should be right up your alley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

It's an entertaining talk about how the NSA gets rid of all those annoying startups and inventors who come up with ways to make life harder for the intelligence services.

Now that it's possible to upload the process to the internet and make it impossible to 'hide', I would agree, it can't be 'hidden' by outside forces unless the inventor never reveals the process. It can be underfunded by the direction of those that won't benefit.
I don't think Chain Reaction (the movie) was believable, I think the process would have been copied by someone in the group and released online, not hidden and stolen by the feds and big oil.

Sorry, but the inventor is wrong. Just because you had a child doesn't mean you know what's best for it.

Graphics Interchange Format. Graphics has a hard G.

JIF with a soft G might be the Giraffe Interchange Format.

Both soft G and hard G are correct. The guy who invented Gif doesn't own the word. No one can own a word.
Similarly, the word “Awful” used to mean “full of awe”. Over time (and I like to think by an over use of it with sarcasm) the word’s meaning changed.
The only person who pronounces Gif wrong, is the person who says you’re pronouncing it wrong. The smug asshole loophole to this would be “Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the file format pronounces it with a soft G”