Category: Feasible inventions

As someone who appreciates Orwell as much as I do, I’m often concerned about the number of ’security’ cameras which scan the public spaces I visit. Actually the number of cameras is not so relevant as who is watching/recording their outputs -and why.

The best security is surely obtained when people don’t have a reason to behave badly. Failing a universal outbreak of fairness and moderation, however, today’s invention is a way to make better use of security camera feeds.

When developing open-source software, many eyes tend to spot problems more easily than a single observer. I therefore advocate making the images from all security cameras publically available.

People who wanted to make a contribution to a nation’s security, at a time of heightened threat, could register, view the faces of a few hundred wanted individuals online and then observe camera images for any evidence of their appearance. This has got to be at least as interesting as existing ‘reality tv shows’ and with a possibly significant payoff.

Each scrutiny session might only be a few minutes long but just the fact that they are potentially being watched, would increase the nervousness of terrorists or criminals. Anyone behaving in a ’suspicious’ way might cause viewers to press an alert button. The local police would only be notified if more than say 5% of watchers agreed (making it very hard for organised criminals to overload the sytem with bogus alerts).

The world of Science is dependent on citing references within publications. The number of citations (and journal in which it appears) are often used as some kind of assessment of each paper. Papers however can be referred to for reasons other than their quality or the positive influence they may have had on the thinking of subsequent authors.

Today’s invention is therefore a system which encourages an author to add information to each reference which says why the citation occurred. At its simplest, each reference could be tagged with symbols which reflect the extent to which it reports novel(N), professionally-undertaken(P) and important work(I). There might also be symbols for “my findings support those of this paper” and vice versa. Each of these signs might also be given a quantitative measure of the extent to which they applied (ie 5I=>”very important work”).

All of this could be made compatible with the semantic web (as currently under construction) and thus allow more meaningful, up to date rating of the cumulative value of an author’s contributions.

Now that fuel is at a ridiculous price, criminals need to be deterred from hijacking roadgoing tankers and stealing their contents.

Today’s invention is a simple mechanical keypad lock applied to the outlet valve of a tanker. This would be made extremely attack-resistant and the combination reset daily. Although few crooks would be daft enough to try using a flame cutter to remove it, even using a hammer and chisel might result in a spark and a truly massive explosion.

Filling stations would be replenished in a sequence that would be hard for a small team of external observers to detect. The combination required to open the lock on a particular day would be called, or texted, through to a particular filling station. Similarly, the address of the target station would be called to the tanker driver only after departure. This would make it futile to stop the truck and threaten the driver or to work out which station to visit and threaten the staff to revel the combination.

Buying a fresh bread stick is a great luxury as far as I’m concerned. I know the French often eat theirs en route from the shop, but I like to get mine home in one piece. Given the mechanical properties and geometry of such bread, I rarely manage to arrive chez moi without snapping each loaf into at least two sections.

Today’s invention is therefore a simple protectif-de-pain. It takes the form of a long, thin foil bag, closed at one end. When the bread is inserted into the bag (which can be reused) a small hand-operated air pump (of the kind used to seal a half-consumed bottle of wine) is used to evacuate the bag. This is then knotted tightly and placed on sale in the usual way.

The partial vacuum within the bag allows external air pressure to rigidify the exterior foil skin, rendering it much more nearly impervious to collisions with the inside of the shopping trolley or car boot.

It also retains more moisture (and tasty smell) than any paper bag can, which adds value to the product in excess of the cost of the mass-produced bag.

Everybody would like their laptop battery to last longer.

Today’s invention is one way to allow that. Normally, when left alone for a while, one’s screen will dim. I suggest applying that by default to all screen real estate, apart from the active window. The screen would thus use a great deal less energy, at the expense of a small amount of extra control circuitry/logic.

It might be possible to have different windows with varying levels of local illumination, depending for example on the recency of last usage (although I can’t think why this would be useful, other than for aesthetic marketing reasons when the machine was on display -or perhaps to draw attention to different windows in a particular order).

Misfuelling is the dreadful name given to putting the wrong fuel in your vehicle. Diesel in a petrol car = bad news. This can be a very costly mistake to make and so there are numerous devices to ensure motorists avoid it. The odd thing is that drivers aren’t all buying these and manufacturers aren’t getting their acts together to factory-fit them. Maybe it’s to do with car companies selling anti-misfuelling insurance?

I was irritated therefore when filling my tank recently (already pretty miffed about the price) to find that the nozzles had been swapped in the pump holsters (the hoses always form a hydra-like rope which doesn’t help distinguish between their origins). Whether caused by some malicious miscreant or just a moron, I nearly ended up with 10 gallons of unwanted Extra-Green-Superoctane-Plus, together with an additional £3k bill.

Today’s invention is a simple, colour-coded plastic location device which is fitted to the ‘heel’ of each nozzle and which allows it only to fit into the correspondingly-shaped locator attached to the correct holster.

A ring or bracelet can be given more lasting value by the memories associated with it. That’s why, I suppose, people care so much about the inheritance of family jewellery and why eg watch manufacturers centre their advertising on the idea of passing their (pricey) products on.

Today’s invention is a ring which can add sentimental value to itself.

The ring would have within it a heart rate monitor. This would record the times when the wearer’s heartbeat exceeded a certain level. The ring could then be wired up to eg a mobile phone (without being removed) and request verbal annotation by the wearer of the exciting events of the last day (or week).

Over time, this would build into a personal history of successive generations of wearers.

I’m told that using a look-down viewfinder is very strongly preferred by many photographers. One of the biggest advantages, apparently is that when taking portrait shots, not being looked at by the snapper directly puts a sitter in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Today’s invention is a simple variant on the standard compact camera LCD display back.

In this case, the display faces the rear of the camera and can be hinged outwards to allow a photographer to look down on it and see the scene in the correct orientation. A wider range of hinge rotation might be provided to allow for conventional positioning of the LCD display on the back face of the camera, facing the user.

You can buy a lot of different necklaces which carry perfume within them. One of their advantages is not having to put perfume onto potentially allergic skin.

Today’s invention is to extend the idea to provide each wearer with a small wallet full of plastic ‘bubbles.’ This would take the form of a matrix of cells, just like many small contact lens cases. Each cell could contain a foam pad each to be extracted and sprayed, by the user, with a small amount of a different perfume and then closed using a press seal.

At each different event in a day, the wearer could open one of the cells and thus tailor their scent for maximum impact (given that the olfactory system rapidly stops being aware of a given smell, very soon after first encountering it). This could be work discreetly in a jacket pocket, without the need to splash organic solvents on one’s skin.

Adventurous types could try creating smell cocktails by opening more than one cell at a time. An electronically controlled version might even allow the wearer to communicate subliminally in real time by opening cells exuding attractive or repulsive scents.

I’m tired of throwing away lots of disposable razors, without even knowing whether the blades are blunt. I use a razor once or twice and the whole ’system’ clogs with a concretion of stubble, skin cells and old soap -making it effectively unusable, even after running it under water at high pressure.

I’ve talked before about the blade cleaning problem…hard-to-clean blades are actually a feature of their underlying business model.

Today’s invention is a washable mouthpiece which snaps onto the rear face of disposable razors. The user blows hard into one end. Air travels in between the blades and dislodges whatever residue there is into the sink (Probably best to do this before everything has dried to a fibre-matrix composite material).

The short passage between mouthpiece and razor would be filled with small-diameter tubes -so that the pressures at their outlet ends would be uniform (thus avoiding the problem of air simply by passing parts of the gap between razor blades which are blocked by gunge).