Home 2010 November (Page 2)

Month: November 2010

#1429: PrePresentation

Presenter-View mode in PowerPoint can be very useful.

Today’s invention is a different viewing mode, for the authors of presentations, which allows them to see what their slides will look like to someone sitting at various locations in an auditorium.

This might be integrated in such a way that each presentation room in a large corporation or university could have its geometry, projector details and lighting characteristics accessible to the presentation program.

This would help avoid creating slides with illegible wording or imagery which was meaningless when viewed from an oblique-angled seating position. It might even be possible to have the program boost the slides’ contrast, increase fontsize etc automatically -to suit a particular set of viewing conditions.

#1428: Breakfaster

When a toaster is first used in the morning, both the bread and the heating elements are cold.

Today’s invention is a control circuit for toasters which monitors the temperature of both heater and toast and which continuously adjusts the current flowing to the element so that the intensity of browning and the delivery rate of slices are both constant.

#1427: Rubberneck bottleneck

It’s an unfortunate fact about people that we seem to have a strong sense of morbid curiosity. This is what causes traffic tailbacks as motorway traffic slows so that drivers can look at an accident on the opposite carriageway.

Today’s invention exploits this character flaw to overcome another: the tendency to drive too fast.

A transporter would be used to move a variety of crashed cars from a breaker’s yard each day to locations where speeding was a problem.

Passing drivers would occasionally see a fresh vehicle wreck and moderate their speed…due partly to momentary shock but mostly so that they could ‘rubberneck.’

#1426: Seamlessmail

Frustrated by not being able to send big email attachments? This drives me nuts several times a month.

Today’s invention is an email program plug-in which detects that your attachments are over the limit imposed by some sysadmin.

Rather than just telling you this (with no further advice), the program would automatically locate the files on your local server and insert the url into your email, so that the recipient could download at their leisure.

#1425: Turnbines

Vertical take-off planes have had vectored thrust engines since the sixties.

Today’s invention is to supply multi-engined airliners with jet engines mounted on gimbals, so that their thrust can be precisely controlled using electronics.

The jets could be mounted on upper and lower wing surfaces, since there would be much less need for all those complex, vulnerable and wing-weakening ailerons and flaps.

#1424: Laminaccess

If you have some viscous fluid between two concentric, rotating cylinders, blobs of dye in it will be smeared out -but then re-formed when the movement is reversed.

Today’s invention uses this laminar flow reversibility as an aid to security.

An instruction about how to open a lock or access a safe can be printed in the form of a coarse, dye-blob message within the apparatus above. The cylinders are then rotated backwards and forwards in a sequence of moves known only to those authorised to access the system.

Such a person can walk up (seeing only an indecipherable smear), reverse the moves and read the secondary message (which might be a vault or pin code).

The fluid would then be flushed and the access details rewritten with a new sequence of moves for the next person.

#1423: Evacables

Today’s invention is (yet) another way for people to escape from skyscrapers in an emergency.

Since these buildings tend to cluster together in city centres, if there is a fire in one, the idea is to run cables onto the roofs of surrounding, shorter towers.

These cables would connected to several other neighbouring buildings and be embedded in walls and ground surfaces.

In an escape situation, the cables would be rapidly tightened (using winches or dropweights) and a sequence of previously attached, window-sized pods would be filled with people and slid down the cables to comparative safety.

#1422: Shortrading

It seems that there is still a significant amount of automated financial trading taking place, despite uncertainty about the instabilities which this may exacerbate in the world’s stockmarkets.

New work at MIT indicates that one can optimise trading performance by locating your machine halfway between market servers to exploit tiny fluctuations in prices.

Today’s invention takes this ridiculous practice to even greater extremes.

In order to exchange data with trading floors faster, it involves placing your automatic trading machine at the bottom of a vertical shaft, dug at one of the hotspots indicated in the research.

This machine would not rely on optical fibres but would lessen the pathlength by transmitting data in a straight line through the earth (using eg the mageto-inductive “Rockphone” technology, which can, it’s claimed, penetrate mountains.

The shorter path length would give you a nanosecond’s edge on the opposition, millions of times a second.

#1421: Tortube

I’m disturbed by the number of times I come up with some idea to do with firearms. Anyway, today’s invention is an easier way to create a rifled bore ie without having to cut spiral grooves.

This involves driving a mandrel axially through a blank barrel. The barrel is then twisted around the central axis, to the point of slight plastic deformation, so as to distort the internal grooves into permanent helices.

The twistrate of these helices can be locally varied so as to optimise the rotational acceleration of the projectile being fired (ie as a function of the varying gas pressure behind it).

#1420: Grabasket

Carrying one of those wire baskets around a supermarket, I like to spread the load as shown. I tend to grip the front edge of the basket and support much of the weight on my forearm.

Today’s invention is a clip-on foam device, in the form of one of those pipe-lagging tubes -but made of stiffer stuff.

This runs across the handle and down its side to the front of the basket, redistributing the weight and stopping any pressure-related pain in arm and fingers.