Archive for: April 2010

For all the clever electronic systems on board, naval ships are still vulnerable to attack by torpedo and by small, fast boats.

Aircraft carriers in particular have a turning circle the size of the equator. Today’s invention is intended to help such large ships resist attacks.

It consists of a mobile palette which can be rolled into position to secure a jet plane rigidly to the deck of a carrier. In the event of an attack, palettes would rapidly swarm under parked planes, turn them to align axially with the direction of approaching threat and fire up their engines.

Given the massive power output of a deckload of jets, this would cause the vessel to roll severely. Firing of the engines several times in synchrony with the roll rate would produce waves of huge amplitude -big enough to sink or deflect many forms of near-surface attack.

Getting a fireplace to light up can be a challenge. Somehow there is never enough of the different constituents (ie various grades of kindling) and I end up using 20 matches attempting, fruitlessly, to get the bark on a solid log to burn.

Today’s invention is therefore fire briquettes which each consist of a solid wood upper surface and a series of other strata of decreasing density. The lowermost layer would be loosely-bonded paper.

A machine could be devised to make these in bulk. This would take the form of a rectangular metal box into which pieces of wood could be dropped, followed by twigs, cardboard and then paper. Slots in the box would allow the contents to be tied in a layered bundle which could then be sawn into stove-sized lengths.

Place several of these at angles to one another in a fireplace and light the papery underside of each…instant conflagration.

I have noticed that schoolchildren are carrying ever increasing amounts of stuff with them (especially books, despite the one-laptop-per-child initiative). This can’t be good for a developing skeleton.

Today’s invention is therefore a schoolbag which has a handle hinged at one end. The handle requires that its sides be pressed together before the bag is lifted, in order to judge the strength of the user.

When next the bag is set down (detected by sensors within the base), the handle determines whether the bag has been carried for long enough to endanger the user’s joints. If so, the handle de-hinges for a preset period to give the user some time to recover.

The handle can also detect which hand is being used to lift the bag (by the relative pressure on each side) and thus can also encourage a change from left to right (by leaving the hinge open until the hand is changed).

Two such bags could even communicate wirelessly -to ensure eg that nearly equal loads had been placed in each.

If we can have bikes and trikes then why not an n-wheeled vehicle called a n-ike? (just waiting for the ‘cease and desist’ letter from the world of humourless chinese trainer manufacturers).

Today’s invention is a simple way to make a bicycle frame using wheels. Two would be used to hold the rear axle and the seat. One more would be clamped between these to hold the drive sprocket. A fourth would be clamped to this one to hold the steering yolk.

With the two on the road that makes six wheels in total. This arrangement offers lightness, ease of manufacture, a way to reuse old wheels and the possibility of personalising the riding geometry by changing the clamping positions.

Google Street View is fun and also hugely useful.

Today’s invention is a way for occupants to express their personalities via this medium, if they choose to.

A property owner or tenant could mail a special division of Google with proof of their occupany. They would then receive a software key in the post allowing them to upload a limited number of facial images to append to their home’s image in Street View.

The faces could be automatically checked before being made public (to ensure that they weren’t all Obama or pac-men, etc).

These faces would then would lie on an optional overlay viewable by anyone interested in eg Who lives at number 58?

A slightly more advanced version would allow individuals’ Twitter feeds to be viewed by clicking on their facial images.

Some cells divide in correspondence with a circadian rhythm.

Today’s invention is a wristwatch which makes use of this fact. A transparent duct containing suitable cell food substrate on the back face is formed into a spiral. This is lit from beneath to enable photosynthesis in eg cyanobacteria.

A small number of bacterial cells are located at the centre of the spiral. As the bacteria divide throughout the day, and feed on the substrate, they expand along the spiral in a deterministic way, passing gradations marked on the duct wall which indicate the time. The marks could even be spaced linearly by varying locally the width of the spiral track.

The spiral becomes filled over a 24 hour period…at which point, a small defined area of the bug population is scraped into the start section of a fresh spiral and the rest (carefully) discarded.

Today’s invention is stereo books, for secure reading.

A bookmark, shown in grey, can be cut to comfortably fit the brow of a user. This is placed between two pages (as shown).

Opposite pages each carry one of a stereo pair of images. The bookmark enables these images to be more easily ‘fused’ by the user so as to generate a 3-D image.

The book could be full of such images. It might also be used as a simple way to allow secure reading of confidential text eg on a plane or train, since each page could be composed of an illegible set of letter components.

I’ve ranted occasionally about the stickers that seem to get attached to many forms of fruit. Today’s invention turns this problem into an advantage.

A new form of fruit-identifying label would be a thicker-than-normal ring. This would be sticky on one side, as usual, but the added depth and hole in the middle would allow the part-eaten fruit to be set down on a flat surface. This would avoid the problem of having an apple or pear roll over and collect eg dust, crumbs etc.

The sticker would still carry the inevitable advertising, of course.

If you wanted to encourage the consumption of eg five items of fruit a day, these rings could each have a part-message printed on them so that assembling five of these into a cylinder would spell out some additional message or web address on the side.

I know almost nothing about the sport of Baseball (apart from the fact that it seems a lot more engaging than cricket or golf).

Undaunted by ignorance, today’s invention is an adaptation to the baseball bat.

This consists of several microphones embedded in the bat surface. When they sense that a ball is nearing for a hit, they cause a weight to be driven axially within the body so that the impact point becomes the centre of percussion. (The weight movement might be effected by eg compressed air).

This allows every impact to occur on a new, specially engineered ‘sweet-spot’.

Even if it doesn’t conform to the rules of competition, it might be useful to novice players, removing the jarring and pain caused by hitting the ball with the wrong part of the bat in training.

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