Sony's mini air conditioner can fit in your pocket
cnet.com
cnet.com
> The humble air conditioner has changed the lives of people in the tropical regions. Before air-con, mental concentration and with it the quality of work deteriorated as the day got hotter and more humid. After lunch, business in many tropical countries stopped until the cooler hours of the late afternoon.
> Historically, advanced civilizations have flourished in the cooler climates. Now lifestyles have become comparable to those in temperate zones, and civilization in the tropical zones need no longer lag behind.
> The ideal invention would be a light polyester air-conditioned undergarment, enclosed around the neck, wrists and ankles and battery operated. Everyone can then work at his optimum temperature and civilization can spread across all climates.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB915764828134990000 (non-paywalled: https://outline.com/d3TYvW)
I can think of a couple of advanced civilizations which developed in warmer climes immediately (Indus valley and Egyptian). Would like to believe climate contributed much lesser (unless extreme like Tundras) to advancement of civilization vs other factors - easier transport/availability of water/natural resources.
Among the 70 hottest countries, only three make the list in terms of economic output per capita: Qatar, UAE, Singapore.
Among the 100 hottest countries, only four make the list (Saudi Arabia is added to the prior group at #71).
It's a rather staggering data point. Basically all the best economies are in the coolest half block. Only Singapore exists in the hottest 100, as a non-resource state.
The best economies group starts near avg ~15 celsius and on down on the list, with Portugal and Greece. Israel and Australia are outliers at 19c & 21c.
In the bottom ~66 coolest, you have this group:
US, China, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, South Korea, New Zealand, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Austria, Ireland, Netherlands, Czech, Slovakia, Slovenia, Iceland, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Chile.
Uruguay just missed that list, they're #70 coolest and have a per capita output ($17k) comparable to Latvia, Hungary and Chile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_y...
Taiwan ($25k output) is also comparable to Australia on avg yearly celsius, it'd be hit or miss to make the top 100 hottest countries list. Thailand has a shot of breaking out of the grouping. They're about as hot as Singapore, and their GDP per capita has climbed to ~$7,200 (up from $2k 17 years ago). Given another 10-15 years I could see them matching something like Hungary or Poland today (~$15k output). And before the crash, for a decade, Venezuela used to be a moderately successful economy and they're also comparable to Singapore on heat (another oil resource state though).
Puerto Rico is an example of this in action. Prior to the hurricane their per capita output was $32,000. Comparable to Italy and South Korea. Yet few would make that comparison, in regards to quality of life, development level, et al. It's of course an artificial inflation, with Puerto Rico getting to ride the US economy.
The second poorest state by output is Arkansas, at $42k. That prompts an odd situation of then comparing Arkansas versus countries with similar per capita output such as Japan, UK, France, New Zealand, etc.
Does Kentucky ($47k) really compare with Finland ($50k)? Or is that mostly the benefit of riding the US output machine. Some states certainly compare better with Finland, such as Massachusetts or Washington for example. Except their output levels are astronomical at $82.5k and $74k.
And all of that naturally opens up questions about Singapore or Australia's output benefit re China. Or Canada's benefit from being next to the US and isolated (versus eg EU nations being near each other and all competing for trade).
And that's because it's not the explanation, which probably lies in The difference between income and product, the differences in the distribution in income, and the difference in lifestyle from tying up resources trying to compensate for the reduced security of weaker social safety nets.
Even if you gave Kentucky universal healthcare and pumped up the social safety net, I think it would take a lot more than that to match the overall quality of life that a Finland offers. That includes everything from culture to architecture to crime / murder. The same is true of other elite outcome nations like Japan, New Zealand, Sweden and Denmark. Maybe Kentucky could develop that given time, or maybe it remains a Greece, Portugal, Hungary or Bulgaria of the US, a lower tier economy state vs the elite outcome states. The poorer nations of Europe usually have normal, functioning welfare states, free education and universal healthcare; it doesn't by itself do much to put them up with the better economies, as so much more goes into it. There's a strong argument that the geographic nature of Kentucky alone might be enough to permanently trap it in a lower tier condition.
My argument is that the only reason relatively backwards states like Arkansas have GDP per capita figures like France and the UK (preposterous on the surface), is because they're heavily free riding on the immense output condition of the US as a whole. I think it's quite obviously true.
The US has a homelessness and poverty rate like Canada. It has free healthcare for the bottom 25%. It spends as much on its welfare state as a share of its economy as Australia and Canada (and rising). Most of its $7.x trillion in government spending goes to welfare state programs / social safety nets of one sort or another. None of that properly explains why Arkansas can have the output per capita of the UK or Japan. The only thing that explains it well, is Arkansas gets to ride the US $62,500 GDP per capita figure (they perform at a subpar level, so their per capita output is 1/3 lower than the national figure). They get innumerable benefits from being part of the US, in terms of the USD standard, smooth national cross border trade, energy supply, military protection, federal subsidies, and so on. Kentucky for example is the third most dependent state when it comes to federal money. Those are pretty huge system benefits that few countries will ever get to experience.
What you de facto have, is states like Washington, California, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Colorado, et al. heavily carrying states like Kentucky or Arkansas. If you're in Europe, and you're N.Macedonia, Ukraine or Serbia, Germany is not doing very much at all to carry you by comparison. And if you're Bulgaria, Hungary, or Croatia within the EU, the same is still true, only to a lesser extent (which partially explains the huge gap in economic output & development between EU nations, far larger than the gap between between US states; Bulgaria has been a member of the EU since 2007, yet their per capita output has barely climbed since 2008, ie hasn't narrowed with the far wealthier nations; the same is true of Hungary, they've seen very little net improvement or narrowing since 2004/2005). US states by comparison have it exceptionally good when it comes to the way they get to ride the overall US economy and its various perks.
Without being part of the US system, I think you'd see a far more dramatic divergence of outcomes among US states. You'd get the nations of Arkansas or Kentucky with a GDP per capita of $10,000 or $15,000, in the same manner you see that type of large divergence in outcomes in eg Europe and Asia.
With Kentucky, given the population, you can imagine New Zealand as a baseline.
When I first moved to Thailand, the first thing that went was my sense of fashion - - it was just too hot to care, and I was soon in shorts and flip flips like the locals. And during midday, if you are outside, there is a general listlessness in the air. The heat is oppressive.
Such economies are losing a huge amount of productivity amongst their blue collar class because it's just too damned hot to do anything.
It sounds silly when said, but air conditioned and affordable undergarments would be a game changer for the planet.
Anecdata, but I certainly know people who are from hot countries and work in hot countries who don’t seem to have a problem being driven, smart, productive, etc.
Once I’m in an air conditioned office, I’m what you presumably call driven, smart and productive.
I hate the heat so much I refuse to return to that country.
There is some vestige of that in 1960s(?) Carib-pop Day-O/Day Dah Light. Banana bunches were picked early morning to avoid the heat of the day.
That inefficiency also creates one more problem: assuming they solve the getting-rid-of-hot-air one, this thing will work as an heater for the room in which it works, because some power is always lost into heat, which will turn in less efficiency for the heat pump since it is now working in a hotter environment. And there's power consumption too: peltier devices of decent size draw amperes, not milliamperes, so a pocket sized device like that one, assuming they can change the laws of physics and solve all other problems, won't offer any benefit for more than maybe a couple hours at half power.
My conclusion is that toy is no more than a marketing gimmick that will never work, but (thanks to Sony's name too) as with all non working gimmicks that rely on 1% of correct-but-not-usable-here science and 99% of marketing, it will be cloned and produced in quantities by far east companies to be sold for cheap online, only to be immediately thrown away in some landfill.
it might provide a cool feeling on your neck but its going to be purely psychological.
Do you happen to know if there are fridges with heat scavenging ?
To compare to CPU cooling, a human is a small CPU in terms of power production. Peltier CPU coolers are not popular because they tend to be less efficient than big air heat exchangers… but… A Peltier CPU cooler is an "instead of" device. A Peltier cooler bolted on to your fanny is an "in addition to" cooling device.
Um actually: only humans & horses use perspiration for cooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspiration)
But the article is correct. It's not remotely a primary dissipation method for most mammals. Those animals don't need to sweat to stay alive.
So, what I'm hearing here is that in the future, fashions will incorporate massive shoulder pads with fins and spikes, and large metal cat ears to cool the head mounted equipment.
Anime had it right all along!
The theory is that since we are cooling using direct-skin-contact and utilizing blood-flow to cool the body it is much more efficient than air cooling.
[1] https://embrlabs.com [2] https://www.dhamainnovations.com [3] (DYI) https://www.instructables.com/id/Wrist-Cooling-System
https://news.stanford.edu/2012/08/29/cooling-glove-research-...
https://www.rtxcorecontrol.com.au/
earlier prototype from 2007 https://www.wired.com/2007/05/corecontrol-rtx/ I remember seeing this one on Discovery TV
Embrlabs spun out of an MIT project called Wristify and have a patented wave-like cooling, which is supposed to prevent the body from going into cold-spot-prevention mode.
There's a lot of reviews, including pictures, where the vast majority says it's working as advertised https://embrlabs.com/embr-wave/#yotpo-reviews but under-powered for some users.
If anyone has first-hand experience with these devices, I'd love to hear it! There doesn't seem to be a ton of critic coverage, and what there was didn't really go over how well it works in detail.
I'd readily buy one if I trusted that it could actually be effective.
I guess put your money where your mouth is...
I've long dreamed of a water cooled suit, but it would have too many disadvantages :D
And of course, you validate the market for the product actually exists with real paying customers.
Canon recently did the same thing for a new action style cam that’s a little outside their traditionally much more conservative camera products:
> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/7/3/20680982/ca...
In the case of Sony and Canon, one probably doesn’t need to worry too much about not getting a product if funding goals reached, or your money back in the event the project doesn’t reach its funding goals either.
There is some kind of metaphor in that.
Some old stores have doors that once had a transom window overhead. In older times, the transom windows were opened on a warm day, and hot air in the room would rise, and then be blows out of the building through the transom window.
Today, we close them windows up, creating a box that superheats in the sun. So we stick air conditioners in the old transom windows, and they blow hot air into the street like jet engines.
As we walk past these, we must duck. The hot air will eventually rise, but as it erupts from the air conditioner, turbulence brings the heat down to our level, making a hot day even hotter for those walking past.
Air conditioning has always been the proposition that “I’m cooling myself at somebody else’s expense.”
That's not much of an issue though: "For a 2014 paper, Francisco Salamanca and colleagues at Arizona State University modeled the effects of air conditioning on surface air temps in Phoenix. They found a nighttime increase of about 2°F (and nothing much during the day)" [0].
[0]: https://www.popsci.com/ask-us-anything-does-using-ac-make-it...
I likewise also hear the noise (although in my lifetime air conditioners have gotten quieter, I suspect as a side-effect of air conditioners becoming more efficient).
I guess I'm trying to say that the expression "at someone else's expense" not just a question of the surface temperature.
[1] https://www.slashgear.com/sony-reon-pocket-is-a-crowdfunded-...
Looks like it blows the heat away? So it's really just a spot-cooler, which would be uncool because a cold spot will fool the body in to thinking of an inflamation I think (so you'll get a stiff neck).
... and possibly just in the face of the guy/gal behind you (I am thinking of a typically crowded Tokyo metro/station).
I'm thinking a micromachined scroll compressor could be far more efficient, silent, and perhaps fit in a unit the size of a matchbox and still provide a welcome 25 watts of cooling (from ~5 watts of input power, since the input/output temperature difference is small)
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32911065860.html
Looks like you could combine that with a butane-propane mix as a refrigerant, and make a decent little 2 watt chiller - although it really depends what the efficiency of that compressor is.
I wonder if it would be more efficient than a peltier unit?
It would have to be better than a peltier, since the efficiency for most peltiers is equivalent to a compressor mechanical efficiency of less than 10%. Most cheap-o compressors have a mechanical efficiency better than 50%.
> The target demographic is business people who have to wear suits in the sweltering heat.
If these were to sell in the U.S., where far fewer men wear suits, the target demographic would need larger sizes; many overweight people suffer badly in the heat.
How this device handles this task is unclear.
Maybe there are better (& more sustainable ways) to adapt to heat? Say, wearing different clothes?
Maybe one day Sony will grow big & strong and be able to foot the cost of developing a device.
...oh wait.
This whole thing smells like BS
How to get rich using idiots 101. Brought to you by Sony Kickstarter.
How about we change customs that are historical relics and now just feed global warming with unnecessary air conditioning?
Can't one leader in the banking industry. government, or other influential position point out the futility of sustaining that tradition and start a trend to change?
I'm sure they can find other ways to show their status that don't require wearing multiple layers of wool even in nearly tropical places like Hong Kong that need expensive, chemically intensive cleaning.
For me, 21-22C is comfortable, but anything more than that will have me sweating and affect my productivity.
But even if I'm an outlier (I don't think I am?), 28C is surely too hot for most?
I look forward to this trend continuing and spreading.
How about we retain what little has been left of style (and/or local character), and we don't all look like 15 year old American skater boys, with t-shirts and shorts?
Air-conditioning in the summer is like 10% of energy use in Europe, so there are much better Pareto targets than it. And of course in 37 and 40 degrees celcius + humidity, it's not used because of clothing, it would be used even if people were in t-shirts and underwear...)
(Besides, white shirts can help cool a person, and there are several options for white suits and light fabrics).
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/08/06/national/heatst...
Drinking water will though...
(said as someone who's spent plenty of time outside in summer desert heat without AC and hasn't died yet)
Modern society would not exist without air conditioning, it is completely necessary to sustain our current civilization.
I'll concede that adding air conditioning capacity will increase global warming, but the above point still stands. Without A/C, our civilization is not sustainable.
Works in many hot places around the world. AC can be complementary, but you dramatize.
Most of our electric bill in the summer goes to the AC unit(s). Some people have evap/swap coolers but those only go so far, and stop working during monsoons cause it's already too humid.
Edit: its 8:45am and 97f outside.
Thus said, there are plenty of places around the Mediterranean which have always been pretty warm in the summer, and where there is a convention of closing down between noon and 4 PM, but spreading the work-day longer during the evening and the early morning (think 8-12 4-8 instead of 9-5). So I strongly suspect that there is much about this that is a matter of culture and habit.
(Not to mention that your use of modern is pretty wrong historically, since AC is a contemporary invention, definitely not modern, but I'm digressing...)
Prior to widespread air conditioning, men wore lightweight suits, shorts, and hats in the summer. It was commonplace to have two sets of business attire, one for cool months, another for the summer.
Air conditioning is what made it possible to wear a navy blue wool “power suit” in August, and once that happened, summer clothing stopped appearing at work and became specialized for causal wear to semi-formal activities.
If we want suits without air conditioning, we could theoretically rediscover summer-weight clothing again. But I’m not holding my breath.
But it doesn't even have an open exhaust so a child should see the issue.
Is it even worthy of a takedown on YouTube?
https://qz.com/quartzy/1674873/sonys-new-reon-pocket-is-an-i...
Because women never get hot, right?
I've noticed that the vast majority of women are complaining of being cold, whereas the men are complaining of being too hot. I've noted the same with female partners too - they always seem to be cold when I'm hot.
My guess is this is a function of 2 things:
1. Body mass 2. Hormones
Regarding body mass, the outliers on both sides (men that feel cold, and women that feel hot) tend to be small and slim men, and taller and larger women.
For T-shirts, sizing is an arbitrary XS, S, M, L, XL etc. Most times, I'm a L, but often an M is too small and an XL is ridiculously big - it really is arbitrary.
For shirts, it's based on the neck size. Which is a bastard, as a I have a large neck, so shirts that I can actually button up are extremely baggy on me :/