Min-Kyu Choi's folding plug (from iconeye)
My brother pointed this out to me yesterday and it got me rather excited. Now first of all, for all of you outside the UK, this may be hard to understand. You may even think I’ve lost it. “Plugs? He thinks plugs are going to save the world?” But bear with me…
The reason this excited me – apart from the sheer elegance of Min-Kyu Choi’s design – was because it took me completely by surprise. Living most of my life in the UK, I have, with 60 million others (and a bit of googling reveals this- from which I learn that this kind of plug is also used in Ireland, Sri Lanka, Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar, Botswana, Ghana, Hong Kong, Macau, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Malawi, Nigeria, Mauritius, Iraq, Kuwait, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe), been wrestling with our clunky plugs. They’re ok individually, but whenever you try and put them into an ‘adapter block’, you can end up with a rickety and dangerous cluster and sometimes, you just can’t force them together at all! But, like everyone else who has had to use these things, I have just assumed that they were as invariable a part of the world as the clouds in the sky.
Warning: I am about to make a logical leap that might not be to everbody’s taste… So, what this linked to immediately in my mind was global warming. While I hope things work out well in Copenhagen, it is quite possible they will not. So the world will heat up heading for what, I have no doubt, will be much disaster for our (and may other) species. If this comes to pass… our only hope then will be technological fixes. And this is where Mr Choi’s humble plug is for me a sign of hope. For humans are not good at imagining that the world they have known all their lives could suddenly change tomorrow. This myopia is one of the main failings that has got us into this trouble. However, the flip side of this is that we also can’t see what innovation might appear tomorrow. And, for all our failings, we ARE very inventive and there seems to me some hope in that…
