The iconic phone from Apple seems to be everywhere these days, but what most people don’t realize is that the company had the idea for a multi-use, touch-screen phone long before the original iPhone ever hit shelves. The year was 1983, and a creative Apple designer named Hartmut Esslinger decided to smoosh together a phone and a touch screen to invent the forefather of the iphone.
To the men in our audience: Fellows, how many times have you stood in front of a urinal in the midst of reliving yourself and thought, “I sure wish this thing I am peeing into could tell me if I am healthy or not.” Well, friends, that day may be sooner than you think. Designer Royce Zhang has created this interesting urinal concept which combines a sensor suite, touch screen, and space age design into what he calls the e-Urinal. Does it get weirder? Oh, of course it does.
Zhang says that his concept toilet (emphasis on concept; this thing doesn’t exist yet) would analyze the PH, SG, URO, BLO, WBC, PRO, GLI, BIL, & KET of those who use it. I’m not entirely sure what all those stand for, but the e-Urinal could apparently tell you the pH of your urine, specific gravity of urine , blood in urine, white blood cells in urine, protein in urine, bilirubin in urine, and ketones in urine, among others. Sounds useful, I guess!
Imagine you’ve got a shiny computer that is identical to a Macbook Air, except that it has the energy efficiency of a machine from 20 years ago. That computer would use so much power that you’d get a mere 2.5 seconds of battery life out of the Air’s 50 watt-hour battery instead of the seven hours that the Air actually gets. That is to say, you’d need 10,000 Air batteries to run our hypothetical machine for seven hours. There’s no way you’d fit a beast like that into a slim mailing envelope.
