Archive for: December 2010

Today’s invention is a cake cutter for disputatious, geeky families.

It consists of a rectangular, plastic sheet which is flexible in one direction but not in the other. This is fitted to a graduated metal bar a-b. At points a and b the sheet can be slid through a block at right angles to the bar and locked in place. a is slid towards c initially to correspond to the diameter of a particular cake.

This allows the sheet to always take up the shape of two semicircles. Moving b towards c in steps of 1/n th the diameter, produces n equal-size pieces with interesting shapes.

Think about all the portrait photos on the web (including all those billions of facebook poses). Rather than concentrate on the forced smiles or the pouting, today’s invention is a software tool which can draw conclusions about a webpage based on the backgrounds of the facial images.

Detecting portraits is pretty straightforward. Once this is achieved, a texture and colour analysis should be enough to determine whether the portraits are:

This automated approach provides an extra search filter, allowing one to rule out of consideration a large number of unattractive organisations.

Having spent a good part of today picking up broken beer bottle fragments from the street outside my house, today’s invention is a cheap way to help ensure that drinks bottles don’t form multiple shards when dropped (or thrown).

The idea is to wrap the product label around the bottle in a helix, as shown. Existing labels seem to hold fragments together effectively where they are glued to the glass.

The spiral approach retains many of the potential shards stuck to the label, allowing the broken bottle to be much more easily picked up as a piece (yet without completely obscuring the product inside).

I often have to insert a season ticket into a railway station ticket barrier.

These tickets are made of paper and have a lifetime which is much less than that of the season in question. This usually necessitates several trips to get replacements from the not-always friendly, and much queued-for, ticket office. It also causes roadblocks at rush-hour when the people behind me suddenly have to stop and reverse to let me reverse.

Today’s invention is a ticket barrier which reads the incoming ticket as normal and assesses the readability of the information.

If it is lower than a threshold value, suggesting that it’s about to become useless by virtue of normal wear (but hasn’t been tampered with), the barrier itself will immediately print a new ticket and output that as I pass through (retaining the original for later destruction and or analysis).

Today’s invention is a system for ultra cautious drivers.

Instead of using just their own safety belt, when traveling on their own, they can insert a two-way catch (blue) into their belt mooring which allows them to clip both their own belt and that from the passenger seat around them.

Today’s invention is an oar for a rowing machine. This is intended to give a more realistic rowing action, during training, than the usual handlebar arrangement.

An oar-like arm is attached to the chain which is joined to the flywheel/air damper. The other end of the oar fits into a spring-loaded vertical axle which is, in turn, bolted onto the front stand of the rowing machine.

This allows an oarsman/woman to experience the asymmetry of pulling on an oar and provides an extra source of resistance via the (variable) spring rate.

A further version would allow the axle to be placed on either (or both) sides of the machine. It might also contain a cam within the axle in order to rotate the shaft of the oar according to the current degree of pull-back (thus helping rowers practice turning the blade into and out of the water).

It seems that if you visualise eating something before doing so, you tend to eat significantly less of it.

Today’s invention is therefore a phone application which allows diners to record and upload a small section of video footage every time they eat a new meal.

They can download this to their phone when next they place an order for it in a restaurant or decide on this meal at home. Whilst it’s cooking, they view the previous version of this named meal being consumed and spend a moment or two thinking about how it tasted.

This provides those wishing to lose weight with a little extra support (and might also be linked to in the comments sections of restaurant websites etc).

Tennis can be a particularly hard game when your opponent is more skilled than you.

Today’s invention is a net for a tennis court which can be moved a short distance from its normal, central position and locked in place so as to provide a larger area on the side of the better player. This makes it easier to return his shots, requires that his service be very accurate and allows the lesser player to cover less of the court.

Such an arrangement effectively handicaps the more accomplished player, in a quantifiable way, and thus allows people of differing ability to enjoy a challenging game together.

Today’s invention is a way for a lecturer to ensure that people don’t all sit at the back of a theatre.

All the flip-up seats are initially locked in the up position (apart from those in the front row).

A sensor mat at the door of the room counts people entering (approximately).
When the number of people inside approaches that of the number of seats in the front row, the second row of seats is released so they too can be flipped down.

The process repeats so that the theatre fills from the front (or in any other pattern the person giving the talk requires).

Today’s invention is an airport runway which consists of a bed of tightly packed rollers. Each of these can be rotated at a variable speed and is provided with a controllable, vertical spring and damper.

This arrangement, although more expensive than tarmac, has certain advantages.