Archive for: June 2009

My car has the petrol filler cap on the ‘wrong’ side surprisingly often, when I drive into a service station…How is one to remember which side it’s on?

Sure, it is still possible to drag the hose across the paintwork and fill up a tank located on the far side from the pump but this is hard work, damaging and potentially dangerous, since the nozzle may not engage properly with the inlet tube.

Today’s invention is a telescopic tube which allows a driver to pull up at any pump, thus not wasting time in queueing for one with nozzles on the filler cap’s side of the vehicle.

To fill up with cap adjacent to pump, just do the normal thing. To fill up with the cap far from the pump, simply extend the tube from under the outer cover of the cap and clip it in place on the opposite side of the car (the clip would be at a height to ensure smooth fuel flow into the tank). This allows safe use of the petrol pump with minimal waiting.

I use a variety of swiveling office chairs, which must each rotate by a few hundred*Pi radians each day.

In order to make some use of this spinning, today’s invention is a coffee bean grinder which can be fitted to any such seat.

It consists of an annular can which fits over the central axis of the base (by detaching the seat) and which has a hatch into which beans may be poured. At the bottom of the can, another hatch with a chute allows the ground coffee to be tapped into one’s cafetiere.

The seat is equipped with a fixed arm on the end of which is a roller. This wheel penetrates the annular lid of the bean can and, as the seat rotates relative to the base, so the roller grinds the beans.

This makes a graunching noise, but fills the office with a lovely aroma. A more advanced version would allow hot water to be added to an integrated cafetiere.

It seems that head massage may have a role to play in preventing dementia in certain people with restricted cranial bloodflow (assuming you are not keen on the idea of trepanation).

Today’s invention is therefore a motorcycle helmet adapted so that the internal padding is replaced by inflatable bags.

These are pressurised and depressurised in waves, controlled by a computer and selected by the wearer to give maximal comfort/stimulation/relief from congestion. The rigidity of the outer shell allows opposite balloons to create quite high pressure on the skull.

When trying to buy paint, the biggest imponderable is how the new paint will cover the old surface. This can be 300% out if you are about to splash white emulsion on a fresh plaster coating.

Today’s invention is a handheld tool consisting of hygrometer sensor, of the type used to detect damp in walls, plugged into a cellphone (with camera).

A program on the phone directs the user to take a picture of the colour
of the existing wall (under normal light conditions). The moisture sensor is jabbed into the wall surface (somewhere unobtrusive).

The phone then requests an image of the paintcan barcode (which can be done in the shop, before any purchase is made, to allow comparison of the severals shades of ‘dusky pink’ on offer).

The program can then advise on how much of the paint will be required to cover a square metre of wall surface.

When I see people in banks with taped bundles of notes I wonder if they’d miss one or two.

Today’s invention is a way to ensure that there is the correct number of notes in such a bank-fresh wad.

Each of the notes would be printed with smoothly sequential images of a face in motion (I rather like the idea of asking the queen to say “These are all tenners”).

Since we are hyper-sensitive to facial movements, the bundle of notes could be riffed, like a child’s flick-book, and any discrepancies would indicate an attempt at short-changing.

Today’s invention seems, to me, to be different from other forms of frameless glasses.

These would be in the form of two transparent near-hemispheres, made of flexible plastic so that the thin ‘equator’ region can be pressed onto one’s orbits and the lenses stay in position due to atmospheric pressure. The optical properties of the material would resemble those of existing contact lenses.

When not needed, these can be nested together and placed comfortably and safely in a back pocket.

A brainstorming session should involve a competition to see who can provoke the most contributions from other people. Today’s invention is a way to recognise (and possibly reward) individuals who contribute in this way most effectively.

Everyone who attends a brainstorm would be encouraged to scribble on a shared smartboard (one at a time).

As they write up a new idea and shout it out, they also link their new idea to the one which provoked it (if any did).

The board recognises who said what by the different pens in use and can immediately calculate, and display, who has made the biggest number of fertile suggestions.

It seems that economists have determined that people will increase their tendency to act in accordance with a word printed on the inside of a T shirt (even if no-one else can see the word).

Today’s invention is therefore a small, inward-facing electronic badge which lights up when one’s head penetrates (and stretches slightly) the neck hole of a t shirt.

Worn on the inside of the shirt, the badge would flash up a single word eg ‘cooperative’ or ‘clever’ and thus help the wearer achieve their best possible interactions during the challenges of the day ahead.

Animation is now often performed by computers semi-automatically. An artist supplies first and last key frames and the machine interpolates as best it can.

Foveola is a shape recognition engine which embodies an effective measure of similarity.

Supplying the system with a small shape will automatically generate a list of all shapes in the database which are sufficiently alike, in order of similarity.

Today’s invention is to employ this to create animated movies. If the user enters a start and an end shape, they are regarded by the system as key frames. For example 9 might retrieve 8,E,F and 0 might retrieve 9PRF.

This then allows the following ‘film’ sequence to be created automatically, by reversing the second sequence and joining both together to fill in the gap between key frames: 98EFRP90.

Bullets are designed to do damage, often to a human target.

Today’s invention is a new form of bullet with the opposite intent. Medics on a battlefield would be equipped with a (white+red cross-labeled) rifle. This they would use to fire a very low velocity round at soldiers who had been wounded.

The medical projectiles fired would contain anaesthetic and perhaps even some coagulent or active medicine. This would potentially allow a wounded soldier to save their own life by crawling clear of danger or stabilise them so that their retrieval could be delayed until it was safe for medics to attend and evacuate their comrade.