Archive for: November 2008

Today’s invention is a simple reshaping of the thumbdrive or memory stick.

Rather than have these damn things poke out and constantly being in danger of snapping off when in contact with passing people, pets etc, the stick shown would simply be made to merge in gracefully with the body of one’s laptop.

This would allow eg backing up to occur automatically without necessarily ever having to remove the drive. It might even be possibly to house two drives in one such unit (both plugged in at the same time and possibly both writing to the same memory space).

In the process of trying to run a course recently for some very bright University graduates and postdocs, it occurred to me that I needed to keep close track of the time.

Ever since school exams, I have set my wristwatch on the table in front of me, but when standing to talk to an audience, it always lies flat (and hard to see) or rolls over unexpectedly when I make it stand up on its strap.

Today’s invention is therefore a watchstrap with an asymmetrically-placed clasp. The clasp has a flat outer surface which can be used to act as a stand when the timepiece is tracking one of my interminable PowerPoint fests (but without snagging the wearer’s cuffs).

Call me obsessive, but I get irascible if I find butter in the jampot. It’s not as if I eat a lot of jam, but somehow the whole process of spreading one semifluid on another, using the same implement, offends me.

Today’s invention is intended to allow the application of jam (or marmalade or smooth peanut butter, if you insist) onto a buttered piece of toast/bread, without ever getting one of these venerable spreads into the container of the other.

An ordinary jamjar has the lid removed and replaced by a nozzle device. This has a bellows pump in the neck and a removable grid of nozzles at the other end. Pumping the bellows eventually drives some jam through the nozzles in little spurts -which cover the buttered surface and coalesce there without needing to be spread. To extract the dregs and clean, the grid can be removed. (Obviously ‘whole fruit’ jam or lumpy peanut butter would present a problem).

My mobile phone always seems to need to be juiced up just when I’m getting ready to leave.

There is a tension between refueling a battery every time it gets connected to its charger (tends to be bad for the battery, which usually needs to discharge first) and the requirement to have devices ready when you are. This is particularly true for electronic kit which doesn’t allow its power source to be replaced … “Battery malfunction? Chuck the whole thing out”.

Today’s invention is a charging device which works out the health of any battery connected to it (by measuring the rate at which it will store charge) and which also allows the user to specify the time when it will be required.

The system will issue alerts about potential damage caused by having to charge at an unhealthy rate, together with the option to go ahead anyway. For low urgency systems, the system will actually try to discharge the battery before recharging at the best possible rate to preserve its health and still meet the deadline for use.

Painting aeroplanes is a very costly business. Aircraft dope is surprisingly heavy and has a big effect on the cost of operating an aircraft over its service life. Also, the process of applying a corporate livery to one’s plane is expensive to start with.

Today’s invention is therefore a wing-mounted system which projects an airline’s branding onto a uniformly white fuselage, to be sported by all commercial aircraft. This might actually take the form of moving graphics and even adverts, perhaps.

If you want to rent your 747 to another company, flick the switch and its appearance is transformed. Similarly, if it makes a clumsy landing, the projectors on the pranged machine can be switched off, so as to avoid the bad PR.

Olympic swimming events are timed by an electronic system capable of measurements accurate to within 1/1000 sec. Since the pools themselves are hard to construct with corresponding precision, medals are allocated based on differences of only 1/100 sec.

It seems to me that the lane in which one swims at this level of competition must have a broadly similarly-sized effect on a competitor’s race time. Those at the edges will be contacted by strongly asymmetric wave action and a non-uniform turbulence field.

Today’s invention is a way to limit these non-uniformities. It consists of a set of transparent barriers from the pool floor to above the current level of the lane floats, which they replace. These would be set on the pool bottom and flooded with pool water before an internal, end to end cable is tensioned, exactly equally for each barrier.

These would conveniently stop the fluid dynamics interactions between lanes, whilst still allowing swimmers to see each other.

We are constantly being exhorted by various medical ‘experts’ to consume five fruit items a day. I had been avidly chewing my way through five apples on a daily basis, only to be told that this didn’t count: they had to be different fruits.

So, today’s invention is a reusable net bag with a name tag and containing five pouches, each of which holds a different item of fruit. This would allow convenient, healthy fruit buying as well as monitoring of the amount actually consumed by any individual.

Bored by the sheer complexity of jet engine design, yet enthused by Whittle’s inventiveness and determination, I’m always interested in alternatives.

Here is a much simpler (albeit less efficient) engine in which the rotating elements (blue) are all made in a single, casting (which is therefore inherently robust -the compressor and turbine blades are retained by strong outer rings which rotate in bearings built into eg the body of a wing section).

The simplicity of this inside-out, shaftless design would allow many such engines, each fed centrally with fuel as shown, to power a given aircraft or whatever.

Having spent an earsplitting two days listening to the whine of a dust-filled projector, I began to think of solutions.

When a device such as this screens a message saying “I’m overheating,” it’s probably time to clean out the clag which is mostly causing the problem. Today’s invention is a fan, suitable for computers, projectors etc which is driven by a gearwheel engaging with teeth on the outer edge of a ring joining the ends of its blades. This is an alternative to the normal fixed, central driveshaft.

Such an approach allows a button to be pressed which briefly withdraws the axle supporting the fan and spits this (plastic) item out of the body of the device, allowing it to be thoroughly washed clean, dried and reinserted.

Almost every electronic device now comes with an on-screen keyboard.

Today’s invention introduces an extra measure of novelty and functionality. Although there are lots of keyboards which claim to have arranged the keys according to which are most frequently used (in the population as a whole), the idea today is to use the mapping techniques recently applied to the US election to take account of population density variations.

Each key would have its usage frequency recorded and its on-screen size increased the more it was clicked. The electoral maps techniques could maintain a continuous surface of keys, whilst also changing their individual sizes.

This would make finding the keys most commonly used (by an individual) easier and thus improve both typing speed and accuracy.