When vaporware becomes real.

There is a thrill and a buzz I get when the CGI video of some really cool idea is supplanted by a real video of the idea realized. And that feeling is especially strong when the idea had the combination of extremity and coolth. (Yeah, "coolth." I typed that.)

A recent example is kite-assisted ship propulsion. I remember the first time I saw it... I don't know if it was on the cover of Popular Mechanics, but that's how I picture it. An "artist's rendition" in the style familiar all the way back to proposals for flying cars. The vision was appealing: One of the oldest transportation ideas (using the wind to move heavy loads on water) updated to meet economic challenges (increasing fuel costs) and environmental challenges (Global Warming -- although, to be sure, a shipping magnate wouldn't have to care about, or even believe in, anthropogenic climate change to be motivated toward this idea). The update includes technological leverage: computer control and flying the "sail" up to 300m above the water, where the winds are steadier and stronger than the captains of the Age of Sail ever knew. But it seemed fatuous, and I thought that, like flying cars, it would remain in sci-fi-styled book-cover art only.

But here's my buzz: Reuters has a report on the launch of a proof-of-concept freighter flying a robotically-deployed, computer-controlled, high-flying, propulsion-assisting kite. I'm savoring the thrill.

Cooperating with the Trade Winds (consider the etymology) rather than fighting hull drag with combustion... an idea with a lot of coolth. Bucky Fuller would be all over this.

Human ingenuity - THE resource

Pearl Harbor Day, 2007.

Here's the quickest of entries just to retain a path to a piece of video from Discovery Channel Canada's 2003 piece about an American in the Midwest who, in his retirement, has been moving massive pieces around with only muscle, wood, and rope... and, as he put it, his "favorite tool," gravity. As he builds a version of Stonehenge in his own back yard, he makes it look more like quotidian labor and less like a miracle.

And, he makes me want to shove some stuff around, too.

People with purpose produce surprising and wonderful results, again and again.