Archive for: April 2008

Half the fun of opening a present is the surprise obtained from removing the wrapping (The web is increasingly populated by videos of people unboxing their brand new x20j-cyberdyne, or whatever, so this must be an important phenomenon).

Today’s invention is intended to heighten that surprise: it is decoy wrapping.

Wrap would be bought two sheets at a time. An outer, translucent one, with reduced transparency and an inner one with a choice of decoy markings. These markings might be eg a well-known chocolate box design, to be used for wrapping anything other than chocolates or a famous book jacket to be used for parcelling-up something other than that particular book.

If you fancied a double bluff, of course, that would be an even bigger surprise for the lucky recipient. For those who like to undertake pre-opening investigations by shaking, this might all be extended by the addition of extra weights within the package and even eg some matchboxes filled with curiously rattling contents.

There’s a lot of well-intentioned baloney going around about how wind energy is going to help save the planet. Well, my money is on nuclear but I’m still keen on using any comparatively cheap sources which may be available.

The trouble is, wind turbines are costly -so much so that to build one big enough to be efficient, it may never be able to pay for itself within its service life. So, today’s invention is to harvest wind energy by a simpler means. Trees.

Trees thrash around if the wind gets up. There are even patents (oh dear) for systems of artificial piezoelectric leaves attached to synthetic trees -a bit like those phone masts which visually shout “Look, not a real tree.”

I suggest attaching to the top of each living arbor a thin wire (It might even make sense to stick on a large, leaflike vane to amplify the natural motion). The wire would run down the trunk and be wrapped around a crude ratchet, nailed to it. This would gradually tension a clockspring which would periodically drive a small dynamo.

Wires from all these devices within a forest would converge on eg a local bank of fuel cells or a branch of the main electrical grid.

Somebody said that every possible innovation, in connection with the internal combustion engine, had been proposed by the 1920s.

Today’s invention tries, nonetheless, to provide more flexible engine performance without entailing a massive amount of extra complexity.

Each piston would contain its own internal piston. This would move axially within it, sealed by a secondary set of rings. The internal piston could be arranged so that on upstrokes or downstrokes it could engage with and lock on to the outer piston. Only the innermost piston would connect to the conrod.

This would provide the possibility of computer-controlled variation in compression ratio (and fuel consumption) whilst the engine was operating. Extra levels of pistons-within-pistons might be engineered to create a much smoother (more nearly reversible) intake and exhaust flow pattern (by gradual, relative movements of these pistons).

Attending a big meeting recently at a very fancy university event, I noticed that they had provided little tissue pads to site between the cups and saucers. These were, inevitably, branded with the university crest.

It occurred to me that this all seemed a little crazy.

Today’s invention is a generic saucer made of the same pulpy cellulose material from which egg cartons are formed. This would be supplied to institutions together with a small press in the shape of their emblem or logo (just like the ones you get when you register a company in the UK). The cups would still be ceramic.

There would be no more saucer rattling, the drips would be effectively soaked up, the brands would be displayed prominently and the saucers themselves could be easily recycled into eg plant mulch or more saucers, thus cutting down on the dishwashing load significantly. There would also be no toxic ink residues to worry about.

Worried about how to monitor the health of your domestic feline?

Today’s invention consists of a set of electronic scales, wired to a small computer. The scales are set on a chair or stool. On them is placed a cat feeder device (the kind that automatically delivers a cat’s meal at a set time).

The system is capable of detecting when the cat has arrived on the scales -and whether it leapt on gracefully or dragged its way up there.

It can also tell how long it took the cat to eat its food, after the lid opened (ie was the animal hungry or disinterested?) Over time, the cat can have its weight monitored (which might be used automatically to change the amount of food provided or activate an alarm indicating a health problem to the owner).

For those of us who want to travel faster by rail but don’t much fancy the increased taxes required to revamp the entire transport network…here is one possible contribution.

Trains would be equipped with outrider bogies and tracks would have banking sections attached at corners. These sections would have ramp-shaped run-on sections, so that a train, travelling at much greater speed than normal, could have its outer wheels engaged by the banking curves and allow the whole vehicle to make the turn without derailing itself.

Many people, including me, can’t abide using the phone for communications. I seem to run out of verbal buffer space all too quickly and I have to work very hard to deal with anyone who is asking detailed questions, for example.

Today’s invention is therefore to incorporate a switch-to-text mode within all telephones. This would automatically perform speech to text analysis on an incoming voice signal and display the result on the phone’s screen.

This would allow we aurally-challenged people to keep up (by typing or texting responses). It would also have the additional benefit of keeping a written record of what was said/ agreed (I hate it when people use the phone when they want to go ‘off the record’).

Since most people speak in a pretty incoherent way, being confronted a few moments later by their own babblings might encourage more thinking before speaking in future.

I give a lot of talks, often using the much maligned PowerPoint software (I’d be happier with OpenOffice Presentation, but it isn’t ready for professional use yet).

Today’s invention is an enhancement to these presentation programs which would allow a small window to appear (only on the presenter’s screen) in which a reduced size version of the next slide would be displayed.

This would allow me to anticipate what was about to be seen by the audience and thus smooth the delivery of my material.

I was incensed to come across a beach recently which was ankle deep in plastic flotsam…literally tonnes of the stuff.

It would be hard to collect this off the coastline effectively without a small army of volunteers, so today’s invention is a robot watercraft capable of helping.

The robot would patrol the water, say 100 m off the coast. Floating items could be detected relatively easily against the otherwise uniform water surface using an onboard camera and collected between two booms forming a floating V shape.

Movement of the robot could be directed using a GPS system and it might be possible to have it learn seasonal patterns of junk density, in order to pursue this stuff before it gets on the beach.

(Ideally, I’d like to build one capable of chasing the people who pitch their crap in the ocean and firing it back at them).

I’ve often read books that were not worthy of the name.

Today’s invention is a book comprised of some of the world’s worst writing (a search online for ‘my poems’ or even ‘mein kampf’ will usually deliver quite a lot of appropriate content).

Once printed, on softish quality toilet paper, this material could then be ripped out a page or two at a time and assigned a more appropriate use than pretending to be literature.