Way OT: News of "it"

[CHoaglin at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/16/01 12:21:01 PM Pacific Standard Time, 
goddard.duncan at mtvne.com writes:

<< I think you're both right- I looked at the patent and the news articles 
and decided this was c5 all over again. if kamen gets any backing for this 
apparently wonderful achievement in servo-design, sir clive sinclair will be 
spitting blood.
 so people have seen this wheelchair do it's stuff?
  >>

This doesn't quite make sense to me...The Ibot wheelchair has been known 
about for some time; it's not a big secret and has been demonstrated publicly 
by Kamen, who used it to climb the stairs of the Eiffel tower. It also takes 
more than 10 minutes to assemble with hex wrenches and pliers, at least it 
would take me a good bit longer than that even if I was very familiar with 
assembling the things. Furthermore, it doesn't mesh well with the claim that 
whole cities would be designed around "IT". Quite the opposite, in fact, 
since the Ibot is designed to let handicapped individuals access things they 
could not before _without_ those things having to be designed around them. I 
think it's something else, although one never knows..those claims made by 
kamen and others could all be empty hype to distract people. He wouldn't be 
the first to hype a new invention. Tesla was the master of that art, from 
what I've read, he announced things that were pretty unbelievable (although 
many of them turned out to be quite real and practical) I know I'm rambling a 
bit here, but while I'm on the subject of Tesla, I read a very good book on 
him called TESLA: Master Of Lightning. I think it's probably available from 
Amazon. Big glossy hardcover, with lots of nice pictures and diagrams.

Chris