According to this report about cooking with sound found in Ars technica, a consortium of UK universities plus Los Alamos laboratories have developed a Sterling engine. Essentially, with little energy input, this device will generate heat at one end of a tube, refrigerated air at the other, and electricity from the middle. That is quite a tube!

What problem is the tube trying to solve exactly?

It all sounds like a dream come true for the Third World, where wood is still the main source of heat for cooking, and the only cold storage available to most people are containers wrapped in wet canvas sacking hanging in the shade.

Will the Sterling tube solve the problem in the Third World?

In theory, this Sterling idea should make a difference to the quality of life of its users, because it is simple in construction and presumably cheap to build and run. But as usual, the practice probably won't match the theory on a national or global scale - and you have to think global, seeing as 70% of our fellow humans are in the same sorry shit hole.

Third World development programs inaction

What happens is, a Westerner has a great idea, it seems simple to them, it is cheaper than anything in their own society, they see poor folks overseas with a need... obviously they have solved a major problem? Not on your life. From day one, the ratio of radical ideas to successful uptake is very low. But lets forget the Canadian camel breeder who wanted to teach nomads how to breed camels! Let's be optimistic.

Assume people are hot for a new technology that could actually make their lives better not different. Bring it on! The experts flood in, money is no object to launch a project, funds are available for locals to get in on the scheme. Early adopters run with it, headway is made locally. Hunky dory. But then a couple of things happen.

Maintenance issues

As a project gathers momentum, bad donors deem it a success too early on and decide it is time to pull out. Enthusiasm soon wanes when the local users become saddled with an ongoing maintenance expense that eats into their already small budget. Hence donated machines break once never to be repaired. Sorry bwana, I am not ungrateful or unwilling, but I need money for food not to buy parts. I am thinking of a doomed Landrover services station program in Africa as I write this.

Changing minds issues

Another scenario is where the enthusiasts need to spread the word, which means involving the general populace, which means more funds required. The usual oversight is not the lack of money, (reliable donors have funds covered) but the use of money. They don't grasp the difficult part of the inappropriate technology scenario. Just because there was isolated interest in the first place to do things different, "experts" forget that any change from the norm for the general public is nothing to get excited about. Basically, we have enough going on without making room for just one more thing.

If you don't change, there will be trouble

Before we think of patronizing silly little Third Worlders, ie they are stupid not to do whatever it takes to adopt a tube that gives them a combo fridge and cooker and generator and saves the environment too, the image I have in my mind as I write this, is the latest revelation that many US school authorities are stopping ther laptops for students programs!

It all sounded fine and dandy giving kids this incredible tool to learn with, many educators were enthused to the point of no return, but it fell on its face in many instances. There was no culture of on-line learning, just gaming and chatting. And not enough teachers outside the hard core adopters are tech inclined, and so it just spiralled into an expensive waste of time for many authorities. They gave them back without going hungry. And that is an example of apparenty appropriate technology for a high tech society!

Too much technological change is inappropriate

If that is a poor illustration of the issues of first world solutions for third world society, then imagine a program where instead of laptops, schools have been offered some sort of high-tech nano info absorption device that teaches them twice what they can learn now. It requires a little bit of setting up, and half the time at school but the killer part is that students have to follow a weird timetable that totally disrupts their current routine at home. The likelihood of that taking off?

That is the same scenario when Third Worlders, people like you and me, but 100 times poorer and cut off from the world we know, are presented with a cool solution to their problems. It rarely takes off.

Going full circle, if tech god, Bill Gates, were to get behind the Sterling tube and make it do what his software couldn't in the US, and change the minds of the parents of hungry young kids, and get this neat technology into homes without turning homelife upside down, then we may be on to something.