Moronic CGI inventions
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Office anthropology™
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We introduce a new subcategory of LinkedIn snit: the CGI “engineering” invention designed to ameliorate the effects of an extremely remote contingency, with a complicated, and certain-to-fail-in-real-life mechanical contraption which nevertheless looks awesome and works flawlessly when rendered in on a computer, but — even without mechanical failure — would carry a great risk of injury, death or decapitation to those it is meant to protect should it ever be needed. Another design criteria is engineering much more complicated, elaborate and heavy, necessitating more construction and maintenance expense for a remote contingency than any of the engineering needed for the contraption’s primary purpose.
Earthquake bed
The “prepacked coffin” earthquake bed:
The thing about earthquakes is you don’t know when or where they are going to happen, or how serious they will be. If you did, the sensible design decision would be to not construct your house in that location at all — or, if you really knew when the earthquake was coming, to make sure you were were away on that day.
Unless you are are permanently bedridden, you will spend less than one-third of each day in your bed, so even those earthquake bed owners who do suffer a catastrophic earthquake on their home have at best a 1-in-3 chance of this contraption saving them, and that is if it doesn’t amputate any stray limbs when it is sprung by tell-tale agitation. Heaven forfend you should be a restless sleeper, or use your bed for more, ahh, energetic activities.
Presuming you don’t, therefore, the “earthquake bed” is rather like an exorbitantly expensive, failure-prone and murderous warranty for a toaster that is unlikely to break in the first place.
Detachable airplane cabin
The “self-disassembling-when-already-malfunctioning-in-mid-air plane”:
“Preliminary calculations show that the weight of the aircraft will increase slightly. BUT YUOU WILL FLY WITHOUT FEAR FOR YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY!”
“He who saves a single soul saves the whole world,” said Confucius, but we are not sure that trying to save the whole of economy class will save a single soul. It is an interesting question, actually: would first and business get lumped in with coach? Perhaps cattle class just get issued with plastic parachutes while the whole of the cocktail bar and the lie-flat seats is allowed to drift down in stately elegance.
In any case, the point is this: you are depending on some rather fancy engineering and electronics to work flawlessly to cover the remote contingency that some of the other fancy engineering and electronics in the plan has broken down. Wouldn’t you be better advised to spend your time improving the rest of the engineering in the plane so it doesn’t fall out of the sky in the first place?
The breaching whale train
The pint-sized-train-appearing-from-the-bowels-of-the-earth-at-a-level-crossing:
We can’t stop watching this. It just gets stupider and stupider each time you see it.
Why would anyone engineer an underground train to spontaneously pop out of the ground at a level crossing?
What happens to the cars that are on the road when it splits in half? Do they just collapse into a chasm?
Who are these teeny little high speed trains meant to be for in the first place? Subterranean gnomes? Where are they going, and what’s the hurry? Why the need to terrorise Earthling pedestrians?