Blink to generate power for smart contact lenses
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
What a dystopian prospect. This being the second possible application thought of (as a good thing!) by a team member is quite disturbing. Have people become so desensitized to the omnipresent ads and tracking that they only consider the monetary rewards anymore?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/05/loose-fr...
I'd very much have expected the U.S. to do whatever makes the most profit, so I wonder why there's such a cultural divide.
MGD is on the rise, and the current theory is its due to changes in lifestyle (predominantly from stareing at a screen for too long, which reduces blinking, which causes the glands to stop functioning and eventually die permanently).
Also worth noting. If you're having issues with your eyes and you stare at a screen a "normal" amount by todays standards, go to a dry eye dr. You probably have MGD.
Mine pretty much just let me see stuff. And they're kind of cute.
Alas, my teammate managed to commit something like ten thousand jpegs to our git repo, which completely fucked up our ability to work on it. (Please resist the urge to give me advice on what to do to fix this situation, unless you can travel a decade back in time and give it to my younger self.)
These are expensive so they're usually installed in a few major stores and the insights are extrapolated to everywhere else.
Just curious, I'm not in favor of such applications but I am interested in what privacy aspects are important to people.
I find that privacy is often held as a very high deed when considered on its own right out of any context. But in reality, people are happy to use cash reward cards or pay everything with credit card when they go shopping, or use gmail, or walk around all day with a smart phone in their pocket, etc. (Disclaimer: I do some of these things myself.)
I wasn't talking about publishing streams to the internet but about evaluating sensor data without any attempts to identify the subjects, instead leaving them anonymous.
Having my eye ball as part of the battery chemistry makes me feel a bit squeemish. I would have thought that MEMS vibration harvester would be able to produce more power.
Are we worried about the sodium in the tears reacting with the water, and exploding?
If we managed to react the chlorine and get it out of the water, would we be worried about the sodium exploding then?
(I don't know anything relevant. So I know that salt water spontaneously exploding is a non-issue, but I don't know why that is, and I also don't know how plausible it is to worry about catalyzing the release of chlorine gas from salt water. But the questions seem vaguely related, in my totally uneducated view.)
Because the sodium as dissolved in water is already at its lowest chemical energy state. Elemental sodium, very high energy, like a ball on a high shelf. Ionised sodium, like in salt water, is that same ball on the floor. Not going anywhere.
That's the why. And why we also don't worry about table salt spontaneously releasing chlorine ions - unless we introduce something unusual like bleach.
Upon meeting water, sodium (explosively) releases its electron to water, lowering its energy state to a more favorable state. The extra electron in the water serves to split H2O into H+ and -OH ions. After releasing it's electron, sodium becomes sodium ion (Na+).
Sodium ions (Na+) can only exist in solution. In the case of water and table salt, H2O + NaCl -> H2O + Na+ + Cl- . In other words, adding salt to water produce sodium ions and chlorine ions. Both of these forms are stable in solution, because they have their desired number of electrons (and are at in their most favorable energy states). At no time was sodium (Na) involved in the equation - rather, it's stable ion form (Na+) was involved.
As an aside: You can generate chlorine gas (Cl2) by running electricity through salt water. Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) is also generated, but is immediately split into Na+ and -OH since the generation of NaOH occurred in solution. The -OH makes the water more basic as a result. It would be a good exercise to look into why that is. NaOH loves water - it will suck it right out of the air.
Haven't stretched that chemistry muscle in nearly 15 years...Hope I didn't pull it!
Something seems out of balance here. Water would form H+ and OH- ions in the absence of an additional electron. Once the donation from the sodium occurs, is it forming H+ and OH²⁻?
I'd be worried about chlorine gas generation