Kamen Donates Money to FIRST

Posted 1 May 2002 at 04:01 UTC by steve

A Wired story posted today details Dean Kamen's donations to FIRST. Kamen recently won the $500,000 MIT Lemelson Prize for inventing the widely over-hyped Segway electric scooter. He has donated the entire amount to the FIRST Robotics Competition along with $260,000 raised from an Amazon.com auction of Segway scooters. During the awards ceremony and his speech at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kamen rode a Segway. While most spectators merely thought Kamen "odd", museum personnel were "freaking out", afraid that he'd hurt himself or spectators with the scooter.

Not too bad..., posted 1 May 2002 at 18:44 UTC by josborn » (Journeyer)

...but we are talking about a guy who owns his own island.

I was a little bit annoyed at the last competition I went to when Kamen gave a nice speech about how FIRST wasn't meant to foster violence (they're flagrantly anti-BattleBot at FIRST), but it's so that we can all learn engineering and grow up to solve the world's problems (he did this with many sob stories about poor people in third world countries).

If you really wanted to help the world Dean, why not sell the island, live moderately and give the money to good causes?

Who cares about art?, posted 2 May 2002 at 03:07 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

museum personnel were "freaking out", afraid that he'd hurt himself or spectators with the scooter.

What about the chance that he might damage priceless art?

Curator 1: He hurt a spectator, major lawsuit! Curator 2: He hurt himself, another major lawsuit! Curator 3: He damaged valuable art! Curator 1 & 2: So, who cares about priceless art?

Islands and Swirling Brains, posted 2 May 2002 at 22:29 UTC by steve » (Master)

I wouldn't mind having my own island (here are some pics). It's not quite as cool as I'd imagined at first, though. The Republic of North Dumpling is off the coast of Connecticut and inside US territorial waters so it's not autonomous. Oddly, though, the island has signed a mutual non-agression pact with the US Government (signed by Kamen and Former President Bush (senior)). Weird.

By the way, glad to see you back Swirling Brain. ;-)

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