This is a bed with the mattress consisting of thousands of those little round balls in which you see kids neck-deep at the fast-food playground.
To keep you from sinking, a variable-speed motor will move two opposing conveyors at the bottom of the bed, so that the balls form a column which pushes upward.
This should also reduce bedsores since the pressure points of the mattress are constantly moving during the night.-- RobotVoodooPower, May 28 2008 xkcd ball pit http://blag.xkcd.co...7/ballpit-phase-ii/xkcd author's apartment is a big ball pit [Bukkakinator, May 28 2008] I have doubts about the column effect. I think it's just gonna cause turbulence and subsequent calamity in all attempts to sleep. [-]-- daseva, May 28 2008 Partially baked (see link), no motors though.-- Bukkakinator, May 28 2008 I'm not a fluid dynamicist so I dunno about the column effect either :) But there should be some agitation if only to keep cobras from nesting in its depths.-- RobotVoodooPower, May 29 2008 [+]'d a bed that slowly tosses sleeping cats off the side... wait, how are you going to keep it from tossing *me* off the side ?-- FlyingToaster, May 29 2008 I read in a scientific american or some such that researchers had found a way to shake a can of nuts for this effect.
If you shake a can of nuts side to side, the smaller nuts sink to the bottom, and the larger nuts get pushed up to the top. This should be a little easier to set up than conveyor belts on the bottom. Since us halfbakers are all nuts, and most of us are bigger than our balls, a side to side shaker should keep us from drowning in our balls.-- ye_river_xiv, May 31 2008 Read this as "Pitbull Bed". [Goes of to have eyes examined...]-- DrCurry, May 31 2008 Read this as Brad Pit Bed... Don't worry, it's not your eyes.-- ye_river_xiv, May 31 2008 I wonder if the strength of connotation in a word enhances contextual misunderstanding. That is, lot's of things happen in a bed, not all of which are real or should be realized, and this delicacy forces our little brains to wonder into the aforementioned follies.-- daseva, Jun 01 2008 //lot's of things happen in a bed, not all of which are real// <sigh> so true... I really wanted large furry balls-- FlyingToaster, Jun 01 2008 random, halfbakery