Published: December 14, 2003
The 3rd Annual
Year in Ideas
"Each December, The New York Times Magazine looks back at the year through an unusual lens: ideas. We send out a team of researchers and reporters to investigate the latest thinking in every subject imaginable -- not just war, medicine and politics but also cosmetics, literary theory and Wiffle-ball technology -- and to bring back the most innovative, intriguing, mystifying and promising ideas they can find. Then we boil that vast intellectual stew down to the issue you hold in your hands: an alphabetical encyclopedia of the 67 inventions, breakthroughs and theories (big and small, nice and nasty) that made a difference in 2003.
Although the predictable big thinkers are represented here -- Paul Wolfowitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editors of US Weekly -- an unusual proportion of this year's crop of ideas comes from lone-wolf thinkers of one stripe or another: basement tinkerers, armchair philosophers, mad scientists.
Take Michael Kennedy, a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, whose big idea this year (G.I. Bill for College Athletes) had absolutely nothing to do with geography but might offer a solution to the conundrum of big-money college athletics. Or consider Frank Polifka, a Kansas wheat farmer, who invented an industrial garbage disposal that works like a contained cyclone (Tornado in a Can). It functions brilliantly, pulverizing waste of all kinds into a fine dust -- but no one (Polifka included) can figure out why. And then there is David Stevenson, a professor at Caltech, who in May came up with a real-life plan to accomplish a longtime dream of science fiction writers and 10-year-olds everywhere: drilling straight down to the center of the earth (The Jules Verne Project).
This issue, then, is not just a compilation of the year's most significant and thought-provoking ideas. It's also a salute to the schemers, oddballs and other unorthodox geniuses toiling away in their labs and libraries, bent on changing the world armed with nothing but a brand-new big idea."
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page 97 By ERYN BROWN:
Tornado in a Can The awesome destructive force of tornadoes -- iconized in ''The Wizard of Oz'' and fetishized in ''Twister'' -- has been harnessed by a 65-year-old farmer who, as central casting would have it, hails from Kansas.
Frank Polifka, who farms wheat and milo, invented a contraption called the Windhexe, which creates a tornado-force wind within a steel funnel. A contained cyclone, it turns out, is very useful for pulverizing things. Polifka has reduced broccoli to powder. Same with rocks, aluminum cans, shark cartilage, coal, sewage, household garbage and the membranes that line eggshells. Now, with the help of business partners, his machine is being put to use on bigger things. Energy companies in Australia are using it to remove moisture from coal. A garbage-processing plant in Pennsylvania will go online with its Windhexe next month; the machine can turn two tons of trash into one ton of sterile powder. And in November, a North Carolina poultry processor started turning chicken parts into a high-protein powder for use in the manufacture of pet food.
Polifka, who made his first Windhexe about 15 years ago, designed his machine to push compressed air through nozzles at the top of the funnel-shaped can. Small deflection plates then force that air to flow in a counterclockwise direction, creating a miniature tornado. Using just a fraction of the energy employed by conventional crushers and dryers, the Windhexe breaks solid material down, increasing its surface area. It then exposes the degraded material to the heat cast off by its air compressors, evaporating any moisture within. David Winsness, an engineer who is working with Polifka to market the invention, envisions a day when every home will have its own Windhexe -- churning loads of household trash and sewage into handfuls of fine powder.
These mundane uses don't mean the fearsome twister has lost its mystique. One of the most delicious things about the Windhexe is that theoretically the thing shouldn't work at all. Its compressed-air streams don't have enough energy to crush much of what it pulverizes. But somehow when those air streams are molded into the shape of a tornado, they become supercharged. ''An engineer could not have invented this,'' Winsness says. ''As an engineer, you don't try anything that's theoretically impossible.'' (Polifka has a 12th-grade education.) ''I don't know what it really does,'' admits Polifka, who once tried and failed to photograph the inside of a working Windhexe using strobe lights. ''No one's been able to explain it.''
Blown apart:
Beets before and after the Windhexe
from NY Times, December 14, 2003