Home 2008 June (Page 2)

Month: June 2008

#549: Sendelay

We’ve all done it; sent that pointedly truthful email to some authority figure at the end of the week, when silence might have been a better idea. Monday morning comes around and we wonder why our sense of restraint was momentarily relaxed by the thought of a couple of days’ freedom from the idiocies of the daily grind.

Today’s invention is a piece of code which dwells in your email client and which ensures that when you click Send in the last hour of a Friday afternoon, or just before a holiday, nothing actually gets delivered.

On returning to your desk, refreshed and with an added sense of perspective on the slings and arrows of the previous period, the code will issue a query about whether you really want to send the draft it created.

At least then you get the option to nuke your career in cold blood or safely press Delete.

#548: Wingbeats

I hate flying. No, in fact, it’s airlines I have a problem with. I find it difficult to place the lives of my family in the hands of organisations which can’t guarantee that even our bags will get delivered on time and intact -or which choose to fly through rough air to save on fuel.

Today’s invention is a simple heartbeat monitor which airline passengers would be required to wear on their wrist. This would plug into the audio jack in all passenger seats and provide data about when in a flight heartbeats rose rapidly. This would be correlated with the control movements stored in the flight recorder and these, in turn, would provide a measure of the smoothness with which each pilot was doing his/her job.

This would have to take into account the showing of any particularly emotional inflight movies, but such events are deliberately pretty rare in my experience. In addition, anyone about to experience a heart attack or undertake some act of violence would be detectable via their change in pulse, in time for crew members to do something about the situation.

#547: Pressvest

Almost all humans enjoy, even need, an occasional hug.

Today’s invention is a vest which can record a temporal distribution of pressure across its surface, when a wearer is hugged, and then reproduce it later. Such a design might best be built using a form of durable bubble wrap. Each ‘bubble’ could be fitted with a pressure sensor and an independent air feed.

A microcomputer would record the variation in pressure experienced in each cell during the embrace of a particular loved one. This could then be reproduced by raising and lowering the pressure in each bubble to recreate at least the physical sensations of the hugging effect.

The characteristic hugs of several different loved ones could be separately recorded and played back in order to provide appropriate inspiration or reassurance during that tough day at work or during times of emotional turmoil.

#546: StepSpars

I must have almost fallen off stepladders more than a dozen times, just managing to reassert equilibrium at the last minute and thus avoiding serious injury. Actually, I think that the fear reaction on each occasion has heightened my sense of vulnerability and caused me to take extra care subsequently -even when when at limited altitudes.

Anyway, today’s invention is a simple way to reduce the chances of falling off such a ladder sideways: my most common near-miss mechanism.

Each step ladder would have holes in the (extruded, box-section aluminimum) legs within a cm or so of the ground. The ladder would come supplied with two additional lengths of the same material which can be easily passed through these holes, as shown. These beams would be rotated to lock in position.

Even aggressive rocking or overreaching by someone at the top of the ladder would not therefore be able to lift any of the feet more than a tiny distance off the ground.

#545: Spillseal

Wine is in many respects a great boon…until it ends up on your new carpet, bed, lapel, irreplaceable family heirloom etc.

Kids have known about nospill cups for a long time but adults are so desperate to look sophisticated (whilst drinking?) that they eschew plastic, lidded beakers.

Today’s invention is a glass with an internal sealing mechanism. Press the stem button to fill it or drink from it. When it’s not pressed, the contents are sealed inside, safe from being splashed around.

#544: Paintpointer

99% of wall paintings and graffiti are ugly, inarticulate and a waste of paint. Very occasionally, I’ll spot an advertising, artistic or even a political mural that really works, in the sense of actually conveying an effective, thoughtful or emotional message.

Today’s invention is a device which will allow the reproduction of a digital picture, in paint, at a greatly increased scale from that of the original. There are lots of systems which use a Wii Remote device to create images on a screen. Here, instead, the wii is attached to an airbrush which has multiple paint reservoirs. A user can wave the airbrush across a surface, without having to exercise any particular finescale control.

The Wii sensor detects where the Wii (and airbrush) are pointing and passes that information to a laptop. This decides what colour should be used for the patch of surface currently being addressed. A multi-way valve is then operated to determine which paint to use from moment to moment.

This would allow the reproduction of great works of art semiautomatically on otherwise unattractive buildings. Equipped with a CAD model of a non-flat surface, it might even be able to paint such images on a car or the side of a commercial vehicle.

#543: Arithmegame

It can be hard for children to understand even the early stages of arithmetic. If they don’t get these right, then anything subsequently involving numeracy will always be a struggle. One way to help, might be to link more directly the symbolic representations eg ‘9’, ‘two’ etc with counters of the type commonly used in primary schools.

Today’s invention is a game-like animated program which could run on eg any flavour of OLPC machine. Numbers would be represented as a queue of iconic people or bars or blobs (the child could decide). So something like 5+3 could be shown as equivalent to the joining of ||||| and ||| . These bars might bump into each other and swap positions, to provide some identification -and indicate commutativity. These counters would be animated in 3-D so that a scene containing them could be zoomed around at will. Operations like 131+255 which are scarily hard to visualise mentally could then be controlled and manipulated externally on the screen.

Higher numerical concepts such as the square root could be shown as a field of counters being reduced to a smaller square in one corner. This approach would help avoid obviously wrong numerical results by making them visually implausible and emphasise the importance of anticipating a calculation’s output. Reducing the importance of abstract symbol manipulation (algorithm execution), in favour of understanding the concepts would also be a good way to prime children for rational thinking in general.

#542: Humidiflier

I understand that there’s a certain desert-dwelling beetle that can collect water from the atmosphere on foggy days just by opening its wings. Which brings me to the subject of airline toilets. Northwest, like all airlines, are getting obsessive about shedding excess weight, especially water, from their planes. Every 25 pounds they remove, saves $440,000 a year, due to the cost of fuel, they say.

Today’s invention is a system to collect water vapour as it impacts and condenses on the leading edges of airliner wings. Arrays of pores in these edges, backed by absorptive foam, would allow water to be caught and pumped away into the fuselage without increasing the drag (and fuel bills). This water would only be captured and used on-demand by the aircraft lavatories, greatly reducing the total amount of liquid carried on board.

This would also lessen any additional global warming associated with jets dumping water carried up in their tanks. It might also have the effect of warming the wings slightly, reducing the tendency for them to ice-up.

#541: Designerliner

I’m advised by some females of my acquaintance that handbags must match their clothing ensemble. This means that the essentials of life that they cart around must all be transferred from bag to bag according to their couture du jour. (This colour matching is a problem I never have, since I tend to dress as far possible in uniform navy blue).

Today’s invention is an inner handbag (purse, if you are American) which allows these myriad secret contents to be conveniently transferred from bag to bag as a unit.

The inner bag would need to be constructed as a bunch of zip-linked, transparent pouches, so that the various nonstandard handbag geometries could be dealt with.

Each of these pouches might have a different-coloured, glow-in-the-dark neck in order to minimise the access time for keys, phone, emergency chocolate etc. Actually, an integral light, activated by opening the outer bag would provide an obvious benefit.

#540: Etiquettable

It may be that fancy restaurants, interview lunches and dinner parties will soon benefit from serving dinner on a sensitive computing table device.

Today’s invention is a program for such a system which would be able to monitor and control a formal meal. It could display menus, ensure the place settings were correctly arrayed and alert diners to the appropriate knife to be using…if they were to pick up eating irons or glassware in the wrong order (horrors!), a small light would flash on the surface. If the wine bottle wasn’t cold enough, a message would be sent to that effect to the earpiece of the relevant waiter.

It could even determine the rate at which food was being eaten from a plate and assess, over repeated visits, the likelihood of eating disorders. If, heaven forfend, one were talking whilst food had just been lifted or had one’s elbows on the table, such faux pas could be sent in an advisory report to diners after the event.

Messy eater? The table program would even be able to calculate the area of food debris around one’s place setting and might even lower your priority on future guestlists.