Archive for: June 2010

It seems that colour perception gradually develops a greenish ‘overlay’ as long as one is awake (and gets reset after a night’s sleep).

If you work in an industry where judging colours is important, such as interior decorating or fashion design, this may actually have a significant effect.

Today’s invention is a plugin for Photoshop (or Gimp) which takes this into account and very gradually changes the screen colour balance towards the reddish end throughout a day’s work.

Following a wakeful night, a colour matching test could be arranged at the start of the day to recalibrate the screen so as to provide a personalised, consistent starting point.

Today’s invention is a way to deal with domestic broken glass.

Rather than fill the kitchen with a pile of fragments waiting to be wrapped in cardboard and dumped in the regular bin, there is a better way.

A glass jar is made just small enough to fit through the hole in a bottle bank. This jar has a glass, screw-on lid…no other materials are involved.

When anything glass is broken, the bits are gathered and placed in this jar. When the jar is full, it is transported to the bottle bank and the whole thing dumped in to be recycled.

If you fancy having an invention created in your name or dedicated to a loved-one, do make a small donation via the button on the right and drop me an email with the details of the individual concerned as well as any preferences as to application area etc.

As with all IOTD ideas, the invention will be published here -ie in the public domain of the loyal readership of this blog.

I’ll do my best to come up with something suitable within a week (and email you the link).

All income via this process will go towards the InventorCentre, as usual.
Cheers,
Patrick
(pra at patrickandrews dot com)

When traveling from A to B it seems that people tend to prefer roads which lie south of a line joining A and B (maybe because North feels ‘uphill’).

In an attempt to redress this cognitive bias and redistribute the traffic levels on alternative routes, today’s invention involves representing such southerly roads by thinner lines on a map.

The impression given would be that these are less easily passable and thus help equalise the number of journeys via northerly and southerly routes.

Consider the remarkable inertia-reel seatbelt design.

Today’s invention is to apply that to the humble toilet roll dispenser.

A pair of arms inside the toilet roll would be flung outwards as the toilet roll was rotated when the end of the paper was pulled. These would cause the cardboard liner to stop and the paper to tear off.

With more certainty than is available by just pulling on the end of a conventional paper toilet roll; the more sharply one pulls the inertia reel paper, the shorter the length of paper dispensed.

Last week I was asked by someone about weightlessness and it sparked a curious train of thought. A body travelling around the Earth will be in orbit if its velocity is given by v^2 = rg. What if this occurred not in space, but at sea level? A velocity of sqrt(6.4E6 *9.81) = 8km per sec (Mach 24) would be hard to achieve due to air resistance.

Today’s invention is therefore a pipeline joining cities which are far apart. This is in the shape of a perfectly circular arc bolted to the ground and made of sections of pipe which are sealed so that the whole pipeline can be evacuated.

Airlocks allow a capsule to be inserted and a series of external railguns accelerates this to huge velocity (and brakes it again at the far end).

During transit, the capsule will experience microgravity (possibly useful for in-transit materials processing). This arrangement would allow a small payload of cargo to get from New York to Melbourne in 35 minutes.

(Suddenly opening the downstream end would provide a way to inject satellites into a higher, conventional orbit).

Today’s invention is an app which allows a smartphone user to decide whether his waiting in a queue will allow him to be served before some deadline by which he has to be elsewhere. If it does, he stays, if not, he can save some time by leaving early.

After entering data about departure deadline, level of impatience and desire to be served, the app would continually evaluate the stay/go decision based on manually registering every time someone gets served or chooses to leave the queue. The longer the queue, the more reliable the model of whether to stay or leave.

There would also be incorporated the effect of mental inertia ie the tendency to want to stay in proportion to the waiting time already ‘invested’.

At the very least, such an app would make the waiting seem less onerous.

Today’s invention is a waterslide made with articulating sections and at the bottom end of which is an inflatable boat.

Water is directed into the top end and diverted to either side of the tube periodically. This deflects the slide and diverts the boat, accommodating the slide’s bottom end, around the pool. The boat, being rubber, presents no danger to people swimming in the larger pool.

Users jump in and experience some surprise when they eventually emerge safely into the water-filled inflatable boat which has since changed its location.

Today’s invention is the transparent plugtop.

This allows the interior of an electrical plug to be viewed, so that a user can check that the wiring is correct before plugging in the attached appliance (there might even be coloured lines on the plug’s inside surface with which the wires could be compared).

The fuse rating could also be easily seen as well as any internal scorchmarks or cable fraying.

This could be incorporated in new plugs or as a replacement for existing plugtop front plates.

I’ve been thinking about how to get hold of a desktop manufacturing kit lately (without having $750 easily to hand).

This led to today’s invention: microgravity desktop manufacture.

There are lots of difficulties in trying to arrange additive manufacture processes within the Earth’s gravitational field. Depositing particles means placing them atop layers of other particles, which often enforces an unnatural sequence for eg 3-D printing. This makes creating ‘undercuts’ pretty complicated.

In a spacecraft experiencing the microgravity of Earth orbit, a desktop manufacturing system could consist of a robotic cell, open to the vacuum of space, in which droplets of epoxy-like material could be extruded by a computer-controlled nozzle.

These could be placed precisely anywhere in 3 dimensions, allowing easy fabrication of undercuts (and even wholly internal, unattached features).

Useful perhaps for building new components en route to distant planets.