Carpet Scientist

Category: Newspaper article

This is an article I sent to 'The Ottawa Citizen' in year 2005.

An article aptly called ‘Yeah…This could work’, published in the Saturday Citizen’s Business section killed me (with laughter). The photo (see below) showed a tubular shaped clock covered in shag carpet with a wheel sticking out at one end.



The idea behind this contraption is that the clock would roll to the floor after hitting the snooze button, forcing one to get up when the alarm went off again.

This is an obvious experiment in robotics disguised in shag clothing. After I stopped laughing, and once I saw that this came from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I thought to myself – what would be wrong with:

a) not building such a device or...
b) if you must, designing the clock in such a way that one would have to hold the snooze button progressively longer with each press or...
c) getting up when the alarm goes off.

I wonder how long it took this Carpet Scientist’s mom to ask ‘Eeeek! What happened to my carpet?!!!’.