Word: gingers
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...heartbeat, hundreds of stories full of fevered theorizing gushed forth in the press. Ginger was a hydrogen-powered hovercraft. Or a magnetic antigravity device. Or, closer to the mark, a souped-up scooter. Even the reprobates at South Park got into the act, spoofing Ginger in a recent episode--the details of which, sadly, are unprintable in a family magazine...
...think about backing up." Once again, I follow instructions, and soon I glide in reverse to where I started. With a twist of the wrist, I pirouette in place, and no matter which way I lean or how hard, Ginger refuses to let me fall over. What's going on here is all perfectly explicable--the machine is sensing and reacting to subtle shifts in my balance--but for the moment I am slack-jawed, baffled. It was Arthur C. Clarke who famously observed that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." By that standard, Ginger is advanced indeed...
...Since last January it has also been the tech world's most-speculated-about secret. That was when a book proposal about Ginger, a.k.a. "IT," got leaked to the website Inside.com. Kamen had been working on Ginger for more than a decade, and although the author (with whom the inventor is no longer collaborating) never revealed what Ginger was, his precis included over-the-top assessments from some of Silicon Valley's mightiest kingpins. As big a deal as the PC, said Steve Jobs; maybe bigger than the Internet, said John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape, Amazon.com...
...Fred and Ginger The world of technology has never been short of eccentrics and obsessives, of rich, brilliant oddballs with strange habits and stranger hobbies. But even in this crowd, Dean Kamen stands out. The 50-year-old son of a comic-book artist, he is a college dropout, a self-taught physicist and mechanical engineer with a handful of honorary doctorates, a multimillionaire who wears the same outfit for every occasion: blue jeans, a blue work shirt and a pair of Timberland boots. With the accent of his native Long Island, he speaks slowly, passionately--and endlessly...
...seeds of Ginger were planted at DEKA by what had previously been Kamen's best-known project: the IBOT wheelchair. Developed for and funded by Johnson & Johnson, the IBOT is Kamen's bid to "give the disabled the same kind of mobility the rest of us take for granted"--a six-wheel machine that goes up and down curbs, cruises effortlessly through sand or gravel, and even climbs stairs. More amazing still, the IBOT features something called standing mode, in which it rises up on its wheels and lifts its occupant to eye level while maintaining balance with such stability...