Month: March 2007

It’s hard to sit still for any length of time in comfort. Even the most ergonomically adjustable seating arrangement will start to cause some pain if you don’t get up and walk about every so often.

A research supervisor of mine once drew my attention to some data that encouraged me to make use of all the adjustable features of the ‘task chair’ I was then using. Changing one of the parameters each day, even if only by a small amount, he claimed was a guaranteed way to decrease muscle strain and improve concentration.

Today’s invention is therefore a chair capable of cycling through all the small-scale variants on your preferred sitting position -changing one per day at random, for example. If the chair offers four degrees of freedom and each is altered by no more than say 10%, in 2% jumps, then there are 625 possible combinations of seating position. It doesn’t matter that these aren’t noticeably different, your muscloskeletal system is apparently challenged and reinforced by having to adapt just a little each day.

It would be possible to run the program on one’s desktop computer and have the seat itself incorporate only some low power motors, able to reposition the seat elements (using eg worm and wheel gearing) when under no-load.

This approach might most easily be applied to those car seats which already have personalised programmable configurations. Instead of a static shape for each driver, they could be equipped with software to provide a very slowly changing seating position -thus limiting expensive and distracting back problems for road warriors.

It seems that if you study in a scent-filled room, and then get exposed to that particular scent during the subsequent night’s session of slow-wave sleep, your recall of the material is significantly better next day (See this article).

Today’s invention is a system to promote learning via this mechanism. Users, when asleep, would have their entry to slow-wave sleep detected by a cap wired with an array of electrodes attached to a millivoltmeter. This would in turn be connected an electrical socket scent dispenser (the same one as activated during the previous day’s study period.

Slow-wave sleep would switch the scent on again and reinforce the lesson from the previous day.

It’s not clear if a different smell is required every day in order not to conflate memories. If this turns out to be the case, then it might be enough to create a stably stratified mixture of different oils in the socket reservoir (using scented oils with different smells and densities).

As time passes, and the reservoir level falls, so the relative concentrations of these oils would vary -gradually changing the scent in the room (a duplicate reservoir would be needed to create the right smell during the slow-wave sleep periods).

From 1 January 2005, all electrical work in UK dwellings will need to comply with the new ‘Part P’ requirements and be carried out by persons who are ‘competent to do the work’. Anyone thinking of, for example, adding new circuits to their house will have to get ‘building control’ involved : (

Of course, it’s a well-intentioned scheme -amateurs do kill people unintentionally by crazy high-hubris tinkering. The sad reality is though that the UK is a place where engineering is not recognised as a profession and where tradespeople are free to set up shop without any serious scrutiny.

Sending around some duffer from planning control (who has never changed a plug in his life) and who may be able to devalue your home, by denying you a certificate when you want to sell up, seems a waste of everyone’s time. Actually it seems more like 1984.

Today’s invention is a way for genuinely competent electricians to ‘fingerprint’ their work. This will not only allow house sales to proceed without further external interference, but may also give cowboy tradesmen some serious pause for thought.

Each time an electrician performs a task, he would attach a tag to the work. This would probably best be a laser printed metal one, capable of withstanding a serious domestic fire for many hours. These tags would be printed with a digital signature incorporating the tradesman’s identifier, the date and the postcode of the property (and which would therefore be impossible for a bogus worker to fake or spoof).

Anyone wanting to verify that the work is that of a professional could photograph the tag and send it (by email or MMS) to a government server on which the installation would have been registered. This would enable householders to withold payment, make insurance claims and smooth conveyancing of their property.

Obviously all this would result in increased costs for the homeowner but at least planning people wouldn’t need to get a cut. A small price hike would probably be acceptable, given the real costs of dangerous wiring.

Personally, I’d prefer proper training and professional recognition for everyone who works in an engineering context.

Acoustic levitation is the use of a very intense sound wave to keep a body suspended in mid air. It is fascinating, but not obviously useful for very much outside the space research lab -this despite being allegedly capable of lifting masses of up to a few kilograms.

Today’s invention attempts to apply this effect. Imagine the usual CD system with two speakers. As well as having the loudspeakers play music (or what currently passes for it), they would also emit low-frequency sound waves from a ‘high’ slot in one speaker and a ‘low’ slot in the other.

Although inaudible (to all but a passing, infrasound-tuned elephant) these standing waves would be capable of levitating a single compact disc. It would also be possible to use small pressure fluctuations to spin the disc about a vertical axis, just about as precisiely as is achieved by the motor in a discman-type device (See eg this).

The disc reading optics could be held near the disc surface on a single, elegant arm. This system would not only look stunning but it would do away with the cost, and noise, of a conventional motor.

I don’t have any kind of mud-room in my house, unless you count the dining room. This is a particular problem when there are several pairs of festering, filthy boots mounting up outside the front door -and I’ve been forbidden to experiment with the dishwasher ever again.

“Waiting for the mud to dry so they can be brushed clean” sounds like the kind of thing that manufacturers advise on product literature -marketing types wearing designer loafers that only ever come in contact with polished wood and deep pile carpet.

Today’s invention is simply a carwash for boots. I envisage a box, into which boots get placed, soles facing up. Brushes would scour the boots clean with the aid of some water jets. With brushes made of say 20cm strands, there would be no need to worry about moving them around the boots’ geometry: the brushes would reach everywhere in the box.

Naturally, the water could be recycled, as in a carwash and there might be a fan blowing warm air, if the boots needed urgent reuse.

It should be possible to sense the flowrate of dirt off the boots (by eg optical inspection of the recycling filters). Once the dirt removal rate had fallen below a certain threshold, the boots would be pronounced sufficiently clean and the wash process terminated. (Shining a light through a filter and recording the rate of change of opacity, seems to me to be a generally good way to alert the users of eg washing machines and vacuum cleaners to undertake an urgent clean out -I suspect it’s already done).

The final wash could even contain some waterproofing waxy agent. A number of these bootwash devices could be stacked together for family use, sharing the water and air flows.

This would be a particular boon to people suffering from smelly trainers.