Month: April 2007

I’m slightly surprised by how old fashioned some firefighting techniques are. I suppose it’s not really that surprising that people whose lives depend on well-established systems and procedures are a bit reluctant to experiment.

Take the standard firehose, for example. Given the momentum of the water flow, it can take two or three highly trained firefighters to direct it onto the target area -personnel who are therefore unavailable for other, more important tasks get used essentially as ballast.

Today’s invention is therefore a trolley which accommodates the business end of a ground based firehose. It would incorporate wheels to help the hose get unwound and located manually. Thereafter, water from the hose would be used to fill a large tank in the base of the trolley, ensuring that it remains in place without being held by firefighters.

The top section of the trolley, holding the hose nozzle, would be free to rotate and driven by a hydraulic system powered by the supply water pressure itself. Valves in the system would be radio controlled so that a single operative, standing at a safe distance, could, by opening and closing these, reposition the hose on different targets, as necessary.

Several hoses could be directed by one firefighter in this way (In fact, in areas of high water pressure, a larger number of hoses could be operated, perhaps even being directed automatically to the hottest regions as indicated by thermal imaging cameras).

I’m not, in general, a big fan of noise but here’s a possible exception.

Lots of cyclists are involved in accidents and often it’s because neither car drivers nor pedestrians can hear them coming.

Today’s invention is simply to attach a light plastic tube to some of the spokes of a bicycle’s front wheel. Each tube would be mounted parallel to its spoke with the end closer to the axle closed off. As the bike moves down the street, air rushing over the open end of a pipe causes it to hum, just like blowing over the lip of a beer bottle.

Rotation of the wheel would cause an increase and decrease in volume from any one tube, corresponding to the 12 or 3 o’clock positions, for example.

The tubes could be of different lengths and even tuned in order to generate interesting, even personalised chords. This effect could be enhanced by locating the tubes in a range of circumferential positions.

As the bike’s speed increases, so the frequency of the ‘siren’ would increase. This provides other road users with an extra indication that a bicycyle is closer than they thought and also gives an indication of the speed at which it’s travelling.

In the late 80’s, psychologist Francine Shapiro observed that particular eye movements reduced the intensity of disturbing thoughts in some patients (eg victims of combat stress, rape etc). The truth is no-one really knows why this works, but EMDR does seem effective.

I noticed recently that certain Apple screen savers (eg ‘Beach’ under OS X) were having a similar, low-intensity hypnotic effect. These are essentially still images of a tranquil scene, each of which is very slowly panned and zoomed; imitating the way that one’s eyes tend to move around a scene.

My suspicion is that these screensavers are so popular because they detune the critical, conscious part of the mind and allow access to underlying emotions. A similar thing happens when I read a large body of printed material: my eyes quickly begin to drift around the page, I lose ‘concentration’, and my mind wanders off into emotional states which are unrelated to the text.

Today’s invention is a program capable of making such a moving screensaver from any large JPEG image. The resulting image would be designed to move in those patterns which are known to provide most effective emotional release. This would almost certainly help some people subliminally, without any awareness of being ‘in therapy.’

Occasional tears in the keyboard would be a small price to pay.

Your cellphone design provides an important way to say who they are -apparently. A recent New York Times article talked about how manufacturers are managing to charge huge prices for devices which look cool and make their owners appear smart and/or exclusive -“like a movie star.”

“…the sleek Motorola Razr V3 cellphone first hit the stores just over two years ago, it carried the price tag of a must-have status symbol: $500. Now? About $30 with a two-year service contract.”

Today’s invention is one more attempt to endow such products with this ‘wow’ factor, but without having to pay for fancy (costly) technical innovations they don’t actually need.

This simple mechanism (which is actually part of a booklight) has a couple more links than the standard clamshell design and these seem to imbue it with a significantly more complex, lifelike movement.

Imagine the social effect of being the first with a fold-out cellphone mouthpiece (suitable sound effects during unfolding would enhance this impact further). Devices like this, with more degrees of freedom, also allow for many more interesting unfolding processes than do simpler ones.

Of course, once you start to get into the realm of powered, multilink mechanisms, the possibility of a cellphone-as-robot emerges.  Just think how cool it would be for your cellphone to ‘walk’ to you from the next room when there was an incoming call.

They have tried to fit airbags to motorcycles and even motorcyclists, I understand, but the triggering conditions are extremely hard to get right (so that they don’t fire when travelling over rough ground or when braking hard).

In addition, bikes have the disadvantages that the driver is only centimeters away from any impact and tends to be ejected from the machine, often sideways, during a crash. Airbags might save life if they can be interposed between rider and stationary object, but one of the main causes of injury is abrasion. Airbags will not deal well with high speed tarmac, since it’s difficult to coat them in a thick layer of handstitched goatskin.

Today’s invention attempts to deal with some of these problems. The Hoberman sphere is a brilliant invention with multiple applications. It’s basically a large collection of scissors, joined together so that when they are closed they transform from a small clump to an almost spherical buckminster-like geometry.

I’d suggest that motorcycles could be fitted with several of these, each of which would be made of spring steel and compressed into a small ‘bubble’ enclosure. On impact, with either the road surface or a telegraph pole, the enclosure would shatter, releasing what would almost instantly become a spherical spring, capable of absorbing an enormous amount of energy: a mobile crash barrier.

These devices might even be used on the flanks of a machine in order to stop the bike falling on its side -thus avoiding the usual leg injuries and keeping the rider in the driving seat.

Mathematics textbooks are full of references to fair dice. Fairness they define as yielding equal numbers of each of the 6 possible outcomes, when a die is tossed a very large number of times. A die that came up ‘5’ for the first 30,000 or so tossings, might. however, make one suspicious about exactly how fair it was, even if ‘5’ didn’t reoccur in the next 5,000…it all just shows that humans aren’t naturally attuned to the meaning of probability (anyone’s first 5 minutes in Las Vegas illustrate that).

Today’s invention is a truly fair die.

It consists of a cube with some electronics on board. Each side of the die has a seven-seg display. Whichever of the six sides lands uppermost is the one which displays the result in the usual way (whilst the other five sides show the other five numbers, if necessary).

At each toss, the number to appear on the uppermost face is read from a pregenerated list containing exactly equal numbers of each of the 6 possible outcomes (and distributed along the list using a simple numerical shuffling technique).

If you were concerned that the (predestined) list could be ‘hacked,’ security features, such as holograms, could be embedded in each of the faces. The batteries would require charging occasionally and after say six million throws (that’s 1M 1’s, 1M 2’s, 1M 3’s, etc), the system would shut down permanently.