{"id":1013,"date":"2010-11-06T00:47:40","date_gmt":"2010-11-06T00:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chocobeam.me\/playground\/2010\/11\/lonnie-g-johnson\/"},"modified":"2010-11-06T00:47:40","modified_gmt":"2010-11-06T00:47:40","slug":"lonnie-g-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2010\/11\/lonnie-g-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"Lonnie G Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\"Lonnie<\/a> <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t get over this Lonnie Johnson story<\/a>. It\u2019s actually old news from a few years ago.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m speechless reading his amazing journey. I\u2019m excited with his invention, backed up by the scientific community as something that has enough potential to dramatically change the world (yeah, I\u2019m into this shit these days).<\/p>\n

And yet Lonnie struggles to finance his research. I can\u2019t get over this either.<\/p>\n

When I read about his perfect career at the Air Force and NASA (received multiple achievement awards), his perfect life (helps children in Georgia and created jobs around his hometown), I don\u2019t understand. There\u2019s something deeply wrong in this country well known as Entrepreneur Land when a man like Lonnie is in difficulty to do research on his JTEC engine prototype and maybe start a worldwide revolution.<\/p>\n

I mean the effing PARC<\/a> said  about the invention \u201c it\u2019s a very clever way to extract energy from a heat engine \u2026 It\u2019s incredibly elegant.\u201d<\/em> But the defense about why Lonnie\u2019s concept and prototype are not heavily funded is basically this (comment from ycombinator<\/a>): <\/p>\n

\n

Investing in this is a huge risk since even though the concept might actually work it may turn out that there’s no economical sane way to enter mass production. In addition there’s still the doubt of "too good to be true" because it usually is.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A huge risk to invest a couple million dollars in order to change the entire energy economy, opening new markets? We have games, websites, failing with hundreds of million $ of funding, how come investing even half of that in the potential of the JTEC is crazy?? And if there\u2019s still a doubt how the fuck are you going to make it disappear if you don\u2019t help? It\u2019s the kind of argument you could use for any invention Humanity discovered. It\u2019s almost nonsense to stop at \u201cit\u2019s a risk\u201d<\/em> in R&D. R&D is about taking risks and minimizing or at least manage them.<\/p>\n

Like another comment said, \u201cif an electric sports car for the rich can get funded, so can this guy.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Well apparently not. <\/p>\n

Yeah, he\u2019s a minority. In his skin. In his way and fields he\u2019s doing research \u2013from working on spacecrafts for the government to create squirt guns on its own to building an engine with both private and public interest-, he\u2019s different, not academic, too cool. Probably a bad seller too. <\/p>\n

But the man\u2019s definitely got something, how come he be pretty much left alone in his little town in Georgia with no or very little funding available? Lonnie wants to stay independent and that doesn\u2019t make it easy to get funding I guess. Still, how come?? MIT? Jay Z? Bill Gates? Fucking somebody??   <\/p>\n

He gave a keynote almost two years ago<\/a> and the goal was to develop a 25 Kilowatts engine in less than three years with the help of PARC.<\/p>\n

Nothing in the news.<\/p>\n

During that time, here\u2019s a scale of R&D investments in different types of energy compared to the cost of the war in Iraq<\/a>. Scroll down and cry.<\/p>\n

So my question is: should I start a Kickstarter<\/a> project and help a brother out?<\/p>\n

<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t get over this Lonnie Johnson story. It\u2019s actually old news from a few years ago. I\u2019m speechless reading his amazing journey. I\u2019m excited with his invention, backed up by the scientific community as something that has enough potential to dramatically change the world (yeah, I\u2019m into this shit these days). And yet Lonnie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1013\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}