April 2007 – Page 2 – Invention Of The Day

2007 April (Page 2)

#151: Thought bubbling films

I’ve been talking lately to a science fiction writer about how more of the ‘interior life’ of her characters can be expressed when her latest story inevitably gets made into a ‘Major Motion Picture.’ The old voice over/narrator thing is so 23rd Century.

So I suggested thought bubbles…they are a mainstay of comics, of course but I’ve never seen them used in a film -even films of comic books seem to fight shy. Today’s invention is therefore to embed thought bubbles when editing/postprocessing a movie.

These would need to be multilingual of course but with digital filming taking off, that becomes fairly straightforward -speech to text conversion could even be used to fill the bubbles (as long as it wasn’t a George Lucas script played by a Marlon Brando avatar).

Come to think of it, why isn’t this done already for subtitled films? The thought bubbles themselves could be automatically located in patches of the screen where the texture was uniform, so as not to be too intrusive visually.

#150: Triple-barrelled tap

Having a big kitchen sink (albeit in a small kitchen) is great. You can sluice down all sorts of stuff with some chance of washing away the stains and splatters before they provoke a domestic contretemps.

The major difficulty is tap(s): even the ones which rotate around a central point can only direct the water flow onto a very limited arc of ceramic (and those coffee grounds are always lurking in the corners).

Today’s invention is therefore a universal-fit rubber manifold pipe.

The inlet stabs onto the mixer tap and the other three or four outlets are each equipped with a pinch-close valve and a moulded-in iron wire. This allows the user to direct exactly as much water flow to any part of the sink as is required. The soft iron wire ensures that each outlet stays pointing where you aimed it, even when the flowrate is turned up.

You can buy a version of this for garden use, but it’s just a rigid device for joining hoses: useless for directing flow in a consistent way.

#149: Precision etching

There are many industries that require localised erosive or etching processes; such as electronics fabrication, decorative glassware, engraving jewellery or even ‘stonewashing’ your favourite bluejeans.

What many of them need is a way to control exactly where and how much etching takes place. Well, every time I visit the dentist I’m told the salutary tale of how the surfaces of my teeth are being eroded by bugs that create acid from my food (I also get the spiel about the latest recommended new-and-improved brushing/flossing technique, but that’s another story),

Today’s invention therefore is to apply a precise concentration of sugar solution to a well-defined region and then to add some enamel eating bacteria. After a specified time (at a particular temperature), their acidic output will have etched a tightly controlled region of the surface.

It’s not going to be a fast process, but it seems pretty low-cost and there may be scope for recycling the bugs as well as the acids they produce.

#148: Mailbag bijoux

The Post Office staff get the mail through to every address at a reasonable price, mostly on time -but as a business it’s a total shambles.

When I go to my local Post Office (and I’ve remembered not to go on Wednesday, which unbelievably is half-day closing) I’m surrounded by a plethora of stuff for sale. It’s almost all junk.

So, I thought whilst standing in the inevitable queue, why don’t they make much more effective use of all that high street retail space they are currently trying so hard to shed by closing regional post offices? Answer: like many public sector organisations, that were expected to magically enter the private sector in the ’80s, they haven’t got the required decisionmaking structure or personnel to do the job.

So today’s invention is one thing I’d do if they were to allow me: the post-to-anywhere integrated gift.

I’d equip each post office with a display case containing say twenty postable gift items (which would be the kinds of high quality British-branded things people would want to give to friends and family, at home and overseas).

Each of these would come with a padded envelope, a notelet and a pen. This would enable people to complete the whole gift-giving thing in a last minute or impulsive way: write note -> bag up -> seal -> address ->drop in postbox.

The postage would be prepaid -the gimmic being that it would cover delivery to anywhere on the planet. Naturally, these gifts would be priced at a premium to ensure a healthy profit, but at least they’d be of high quality and there are deals to be made with prestige manufacturers of such bijoux.

I’d also make these available online and in airports as last-minute departure items, to be handed to cabin staff, if necessary.

#147: Sidebike

Motorcycle sidecars were invented for people who couldn’t afford a car, not because they were dynamically graceful or elegant in design.

Given the amount of tinkering that bike enthusiasts do (trikes, truck engines, trailers, etc ) I’m slightly surprised that I can’t find anyone who has developed today’s invention.

It’s simply to attach two motorcycles together in parallel, linking their steering, gearchange and throttle mechanisms so as to create a dual-control machine. The linkage would be a parallelogram in section, allowing the bikes to lean over to the same extent in bends.

Why? Well, first you get lots of the benefits of a small car (eg stability, especially if there are frost patches) but most importantly it provides a way for one experienced rider to teach a less experienced one how to take corners etc safely at speed (something which most riders either never learn -or crash while attempting to discover).

This would require two identical machines to start and there’s not much point in using ‘boxers’, since the cylinder heads are going to be in perpetual conflict. It would, however, be useful to motorcycle training schools, or even as promotional vehicles -Tom Cruise could appear to do more of his own pointless stunts, without having to stick to a straight line.

#146: Live lure

I’m no great fan of inflicting suffering on animals of any sort (with the possible exception of some football hooligans). I do however understand that fishing is a massive sport (or perhaps pastime would be a better description, if you break sweat when fishing, it’s time to talk to a cardiologist).

Anyway, today’s invention is a more effective than normal way to catch big fish.

Take a live, brightly coloured bait fish and place it inside a small transparent box full of water. Attach the box to the end of a fishing line and immerse in your body of water. The box would be hydrodynamically shaped (like a teardrop) so as to align itself fairly stably in the water current.

The movement of the bait fish would attract predators stupid enough to bite at the box and in so doing snag themselves on the nearby hook.

Naturally, I’d expect any fish not caught for food by hungry people to be thrown back (together with the somewhat perturbed, but otherwise unscathed, bait). A refinement of this system might be to have some holes in the top of the box to allow the smell of the bait to escape (as well as any vibrations given off).

If this is all thought too cruel, I’d suggest wrapping an old mobile phone in two condoms (navy seal style), whilst playing a bait fish movie in brilliant colour on the screen (most mobiles already have a piscine form factor).

#145: Hygiene logic

Even the cleanest public washroom is used by people who fail to wash their hands….it’s a fact that occurs to me when I’m just about to push the main door open as I leave. Not much point having disinfected my own hands if I’m then going to make contact with the skin fauna of 1000 insanitary males -let’s not even mention the peanuts-on-the-bar-story.

You could always have an automatic body-sensing, proximity-detecting sliding door but that is apparently not acceptable for public toilets (to say nothing of the cost associated with installing all this kit or the effects of halfwits playing chicken with it).

So, today’s invention is a way to use public toilets without getting an infection. The solution is to have a heavy conventional slamming door on the mensroom, but only to house lavatories and urinals in there. Have all the washhandbasins in an antechamber –with no external door. Then, even if you get covered in bugs from contact with the throneroom door itself, you get to sluice down properly afterwards.

The huge numbers of people who don’t wash can continue on their merry way to hepatitis, as usual.

#144: Cutification

Grown-ups are strongly affected by the cuteness of children’s shoes. Stand outside any shoe shop with tiny trainers or slippers in the window and you’ll hear people of both sexes cooing about how they wish that they could buy stuff that was as cute for themselves. Baby toy manufacturers have always known that they need to exploit this, since their buyers are exclusively adults.

Partly, it’s the aspect ratio (kids’ shoes are essentially blobs) and partly it’s the feature density (I think a similar thing is going on when you notice you have just bought that £300 mountain fleece jacket -it is covered in a dense network of contrast-coloured ‘features’ -zips, tags, flaps, buttons, catches, patches, labels, seams etc.)

The attraction of cute products is also, of course, an effect of small size: think how the Japanese interest in miniaturisation has affected a huge range of markets.

Today’s invention is therefore a cutification programme to be applied to lots of future products aimed at adults. Adult versions would be blobby, miniaturised, colourful and feature-rich. It might even be possible to apply a distortion program to help visualise the transformation of an adult product design into a new cutified version.

What else can explain the Nissan Micra?

#143: Name aid

I’ve been taken aback by my own ability to ignore people who are suffering. When I was a child, tv pictures started appearing in our living room of other small children dying for lack of food (always helped on their way by ‘governments’ from all over the world).

It’s been established by experimental psychologists that it’s much easier to be cruel or neglectful to someone who is anonymous.

Today’s invention is a new use for multicoloured plastic letters, suitable for stringing together to form a simple necklace.

These would be supplied to famine-threatened villages in a big tub. Children would be encouraged to grab these and make necklaces spelling out their names (and even maybe simple messages/greetings).

When the cameras arrive to document their ‘hopeless plight’, these people would be identifiable as individuals, rather than a mass of foreigners who are impossible to help. This might provoke all sorts of people to do a Geldof.

Maybe the necklaces will soon carry personal web addresses, in a further attempt to overcome the danger of anonymity.

#142: Double-decker dosage

I’ve been a little shaken to discover that the over-the-counter painkillers which my family uses have suddenly been doubled in strength -with minimal changes to the packaging and the pills themselves.

Maybe it’s because people find it easier to swallow a double-dose pill, or maybe headaches are just getting worse? I’m not sure how much more expensive they are, so I can’t comment on any possible profit motive.

In any case, this set me thinking about the possible dangers of parents feeding their family twice as much drug as they intended, purely because their medicine has been surreptitiously souped up. This would probably not be fatal, but potentially damaging for an already sick child.

Today’s invention is a way to provide people with a high-dose option (if that’s really necessary) whilst making the amount being taken explicit.

Supply double-strength tablets in a double decker blister package, one layer of which would be empty. Normally, pressing the back of the pack forces a tablet through the foil. In this upgrade, each tablet would then need to be forced through the second, empty layer of blister pack (and foil), so that the idea of double strength would be embodied physically and could therefore not be ignored.

The packs would need to be a bit bigger and more expensive, but given the cost of pharmaceuticals, this seems unimportant.

I’d also manufacture the pills themselves in an unattractive shade of snot-green, rather than Smartie-coloured, in order to minimise any possible confusion with confectionery -darker green could be used to code for the stronger type of tablet (given how reluctant children are to eat peas, this has got to be an effective safety measure).

Month: April 2007