Archive for: September 2008

How to get kit into space? Today’s invention offers an alternative approach to conventional rocketry.

The idea is to build a payload module but much smaller than eg a shuttle (filled with a person and/or a little satellite). Rather than use a multi-stage launch vehicle, drive this module towards escape velocity using a sequence of accelerations supplied by a fleet of identical, small UAV rockets.

These UAVs, would have to be capable of reaching escape velocity individually -but that is almost within the capabilities of some homebrew independent rocketeers. These would be launched in sequence from sites in a line beneath the module’s trajectory and thus form a queue in the sky, chasing the payload.

Each rocket could be programmed to follow its predecessor’s exhaust, so that no advanced navigation is needed. Having impacted on the rear face of the module and flared their fuel, the UAVs would parachute back to earth for reuse.

People have come to recognise the dangers of having one’s identity stolen online.

Today’s invention deals with a new threat, that of location theft. I’ve discovered that some of the geographical details which are supplied by Google are surprisingly inaccurate. These are submitted by individual users and often don’t get checked and fixed by locals (who obviously never look at the maps of their home location).

It occurred to me that one way to screw up a competitor’s business might be to supply Google with false information about their physical location. If customers can’t find them, they are toast.

The simplest approach to dealing with this is to reflect any location information about a business or institution submitted to a search engine, or other online resource, to an email address on the company’s website for confirmation.

Many buildings are visually spoiled by having a giant fire escape bolted to their exterior. This is especially true of ‘listed’ buildings, which are supposed to be preserved with minimal changes to their appearance.

Today’s invention is a fire escape ladder which folds out from a drainpipe. It would unfold, rather like a vertical tierack, as shown. The mechanism would be held in place at the top by a catch release, so that thieves couldn’t deploy it from ground level.

This could either be a faux downpipe, placed there purely to camouflage the escape or an adaptation to an existing pipe. In either case, the pipe/ladder could be suitably adorned with ‘in-keeping’ plumbing furniture, paintwork and casting details.

When using a strimmer on the edges of what passes, in my garden, for a lawn, I’ve noticed that fragments of the nylon line tend to break off all over the place.

Nylon is pretty slow to break-down naturally and so, over a growing season, the whole garden acquires a litter of coloured threads. As long as these aren’t green, they are detectable, but I really don’t want a) the dog to ingest these and b) to have to spend time harvesting the debris of earlier mowings.

Today’s invention is a strimmer line made of biodegradeable polymer (coloured green). Amazingly, I seem unable to find anything like this available already. It might take the form of a woven, raffia-like thread: certainly strong enough both to chop down weeds and to support the tension required for centripetal feeding (Ideally, I’d like to spin a cutting line automatically from fragments of loose grass, but doing so reliably isn’t straightforward).

I’d impregnate it with fungal spores which, when exposed to sunlight, begin at once to return the line to the soil.

Hypertext is all very well but it can be pretty hard to follow any kind of narrative message when you click on a word somewhere in a paragraph and get transported to a whole new webpage -or even a completely different site.

To help avoid this disorientation, today’s invention is an alternative. Clicking on a link within a body of verbage would simply cause the linked-to material to be substituted, by insertion, where the word used to be (perhaps in a contrasting colour). This would be effectively in-page word processing via Javascript.

The insertion might be a definition, an image or a short section of additional explanation (It might even be a translation into a different language or a kids’-vocabulary version). This whole level of functionality could be switched on or off in the browser of course.

I swear iPod Nano is a character in a Douglas Adams book.

Anyway, these bijoux items now come with accelerometers on board…cutesy, but I’m not sure how valuable the functionality actually is.

Today’s invention is the DancePod, a personal network of iPods worn on the limbs, body and head. These are aware of the music being listened to and can sense how coordinated and in-time to that music one’s body movements are. The system will monitor one’s dancing prowess/effort over time and make comments such as ‘are you really sure about Hip-Hop?’

The system could be used to assess dancers (or even divers) quantitatively in competitions.

Anyone who has ever worked on creating any kind of machine vision software knows that even a uniformly-lit surface usually isn’t.

Although eg a page in a book looks beautifully even and white, in fact instruments indicate there is almost always a strong lighting gradient across the printed area. The visual system takes this into account and removes the effect from our conscious perception. I have a theory that this is one of the remaining reasons that people enjoy reading paper books rather than electronic screens. The pages of books are often read deliberately with a curve maintained in the page and I think this is unknowlingly used by readers to provide a subliminal sense of “where I’ve got” to in the text.

Today’s invention is to provide electronic screens with a subtle contrast gradient across the ‘page’ as a reading aid. This might be enhanced by having light sensors in the reader device which could tell where the room lighting was coming from and adjust the gradient(s) accordingly.

When a shredding machine has done its thing, fragments of paper from a single document remain adjacent within the resulting binned material. This makes easier the task of anyone attempting, later, to piece the original together.

To enhance the security of the shredding process, today’s invention effectively shuffles the incoming papers. This would be achieved by having an internal chamber into which some shredded material would be diverted every so often. The next, and presumably related, sheets would then be shredded and fed direct to the final bin. No unshredded material would be kept within the system.

After a while (say after every 10 few pages), the diverted fragments would be binned, so that the bin contents would be more effectively disordered.

Think about a magnet on a pendulum suspended between three or more magnets (with a mixture of the same and opposite polarities). Release the pendulum and it will fly around, being attracted to and repelled from the various fixed magnets. If you choose the arrangement of magnets carefully, the deterministic, but chaotic, motion will rarely be repeated (given the impossibility of starting from exactly the same spot, each time).

Today’s invention is to use this system to plan and drive a funfair ride. A cart containing a small number of people would be driven on a concave, spherical surface in such a way as to simply follow the pendulum’s motion. The relevant (x,y) coordinate of the bob, extracted by rapid image processing from below, would be used to direct the cart.

In this way, ride customers could be sure of always having an unpredictable experience. In fact, for safety reasons, the (X,Y)s could be gathered offline in order to ensure that no dangerous levels of acceleration occur on the actual ride.

Yet more tattoos, I’m afraid.

Today’s invention is effectively a networked, handheld device containing a bank of ink-fed needles, driven by a printer-like mechanism.

This gets strapped securely to the individual interested in body adornment -who can then select from a huge number of available patterns online. They would be able to modify wording/colours etc on-screen before committing to being marked (I’d suggest mandatory spell-checking).

This could be adapted to simply draw on the skin, using long-lasting, but removable, inks.