Heated Socks.
it's not really something i've come across in my everyday life coz I've always lived in either a mediterranean climate or a tropical climate, but i remember hearing about battery powered heated socks from some American or Canadian movie or TV thing (perhaps about ice fishing? it was so long ago).
So... they sound interesting. What's the deal? Do they work well? How long do they last for? Are the batteries huge?
Why i'm suddenly curious, is that i've been pondering computational energy efficiency. How much computational power you get per watt, or watthour. All of that power ends up as heat in the end, it's just a matter of how useful the 'work' is. A resistive heater is pretty brute force, does no useful work while it's producing it's heat.
I've heard people talk about how they just use their computer to heat their room, computers are pretty powerful wattage wise. They run folding@home or whatever, and it keeps their room toasty WHILE doing useful computational stuff.
But here's the thing - the speed of smartphone product development and releases is going kinda mental ATM, there are so many. I don't keep up, but I imagine they're processing power must be getting pretty substantial to somewhat justify all these upgrades to their customers. I've never really heard of heat production in a smartphone being too big of a problem, they must have pretty good ways of conducting the heat away from themselves, heatpipes and whatnot. Perhaps they throttle very well, and also dissipate heat well to the air while outof your pocket and in use.
Smartphones can be thought of as a rather powerful battery that we carry constantly.
The fact that battery powered heated socks are even a thing, makes me wonder if perhaps the 2 could be combined.
Smartphones are getting more powerful, and they thus seem to be quickly becoming the everyday computing platform of choice. The advantages and joy of having an always on mobile computer constantly at your fingertips is obvious, and will only get better. I think smartphones will eventually end up becoming our personal robotic companions, perched on your shoulder - able to look around and even crawl around your body autonomously like a pet, reacting to their (your) environment and giving you contextually appropriate aide.
We'll be running all sorts of things, some of them might be computationally expensive, they might drain the battery, they might make the phone get hot. Particularly if your smartphone is essentially running a camera and computer vision algorithms constantly (thanks Woodchip), which is something robots need to do a lot of.
Walking around in incredibly cold climates, like the Arctic circle in winter, or perhaps even in space or on the surface of Mars, is where electrically heated clothing such as thermal socks would be the most useful. Remember in Red Mars, those diamond patterned heating elements inside the suits, they were battery powered. As our phones become more and more powerful, and battery technology catches up (of which smartphones are one of the primary drivers of innovation), our phones may be creating a lot more heat, enough that it'll become a problem on it's own that needs it's own solutions (ie: "ouch the phone in my pocket is burning me, and i'm not even using it"). If we end up using our (future) clothing to dissipate that heat simply via the useful surface area, we may end up basically heating our clothing with our smartphones (which have now become our tiny mobile always-on personal computers).
I wonder if your smartphone could literally save your life by providing heat to stave off hyperthermia. You have a lot of energy stored in your battery, like a wee little fire, or an explosive if you're not careful. Taken to an extreme: you could be in a spacesuit, perhaps even on the surface of mars, and instead of a resistive heating element keeping you warm, you instead are just running your amazing powerful battery powered personal mobile computer (your smartphone) a bit harder than normal, and the suit is dissipating the resultant heat to your body. Your smartphone could be folding proteins, to keep you warm. When you're cold, you turn up the clockspeed.
I mean you were just going to use batteries to run that resistive heater in your suit anyway - use that same energy to do something useful while it's becomming heat.
As ubiquitous computing becomes more and more of a thing, resistive heaters will be seen as more and more ridiculous. Why turn on the heater when you can tell the computational substrate embedded into the walls of your house (coz computers are so cheap you just put them everywhere, use them as filler) to fold some more proteins, and get the same heating effect. Resistive heaters everywhere should eventually be replaced with computers. Think of everywhere there's a resistive heater, it could be a computer. In your car, in your house, in your socks.
ok that's my rambling post, wow i didn't expect to write/edit/google for almost 2 hours, heh. I forget what the point was.... oh yes: Tell me about heated socks, i need some local knowledge.
