Patrick Andrews, Author at Invention Of The Day

Articles posted by Patrick Andrews (Page 282)

#84: In vitro veritas?

Even though I don’t get to drink expensive wine very often, it bugs me that half a bottle left overnight just doesn’t taste as good (no amount of pumps or seals of duck-billed valves makes much difference). No doubt some wine-snob chemists could explain that it’s to do with the air removing certain volatile components in a particular sequence.

So today’s invention will scandalise them: it’s wine in a bag, in a bottle. Boxed wine stays fresh for longer, so why not insert a smaller than average wine bag into each bottle of quality wine before it is filled and ‘laid down’ ? No air contact with the wine, even when the bag collapses years later during dinner (moments before I do).

For those of us who aren’t compelled to quaff a whole bottle once it’s open, this could be a way to enjoy pricier wines…certainly the additional cost of the inserted bag would be negligible.

A seriously sneakier thing to do would be to allow the wine to mature and be transported across the globe in individual bags but then to carefully feed those wine-filled bags into bottles of local origin…thus saving the horrendous cost of transporting all that glass (might require bags shaped like tapeworms, but that’s a marketing issue).

Sacrilege, I hear them yelling? Only a few years ago, people were baulking at the idea of plastic corks; now even they are gaining viticultural credibility.

#83: Creativity test

I’m obsessed by the phenomenon I call visual metaphor: when one object can be seen as being ‘like’ some other to which it is otherwise unrelated. Consider the piece of toast which my three year old daughter suddenly declared to be a cow, below. (I’m also pretty sure that similar things exist in other modalities…aural metaphors are probably what are commonly known as puns).

This seems to be the ability to generalise to a very large extent: something which highly analytical types have trouble with, but at which artistic or imaginative people excel (although they, in turn, generally seem to have problems with minimal generalisation…ie tasks requiring step-by-step, small scale logical deduction).

Why might the ability to generalise to this absurd extent have been evolutionarily valuable? Being able to see that a snake resembles a cigar, resembles a penis, resembles a sportscar, resembles a fountain pen is not obviously that useful.

This ability may however have allowed our distant ancestors to make some kind of guesses about the behaviour of a new phenomenon which appeared (when they had almost no other information) based on very loose similarity between it and something already known about. Rather than standing around looking completely confused when the first steam engine appeared, some Native Americans dubbed it an ‘iron horse’ and reacted accordingly.

This ability nowadays may help invention to occur, in the sense that you can mentally swap properties between two objects recognised as being only very distantly similar eg
A cigar:

you light one end
you draw smoke through it
it comes in a metal cannister

and a fountain pen:

it splits in two
it is located in the pocket by a clip
you make marks with it.

Now, swap some properties:

you might have a pen with a light at one end?
maybe you could make marks using an airborne flow of carbon particles, like a photcopier?
maybe you could supply cigars in a metal cannister that also allowed you to write with it?
perhaps cigars should come equipped with an attachment to locate them in a shirt pocket?
they could sport a device which prevents them being lit? etc

Anyway, today’s invention is a test by which the ability of people to spot such analogies can be measured and used as some kind of a creativity index. Simply show them a range of images which may have multiple interpretations and count the number of alternatives with which they come up.

#82: Cordite lite

For those of us who live in countries where bearing firearms is considered important, today’s invention is an attempt to limit the damage that gun proliferation causes.

The idea is simply to put less propellant into bullets you can buy legally. When you browse for your favourite .44 magnum cartridges at Death-R-Us, you will be able to buy only bullets which look completely normal, but which have had their gunpowder or cordite propellant ‘cut’ with something more benign, like talcum powder.

This will still allow people to enjoy owning all that phallic symbolism and making a loud bang, but prevent them from drilling unnatural holes in each other. In fact, I’d suggest that the propellant be reduced so as to allow all ammo to deliver non-lethal impacts, even at arm’s length -enough for property owners to defend their houses/wives from assailants, but not enough to allow driveby’s, armed robbery, school sieges or assassination. I’m talking about delivering an amount of energy equivalent to a medium strength hammer blow, so that even determined bad guys will be keen to re-evaluate their whole approach.

Criminals will then be faced with massively increased prices for ammunition which has had to be illegally imported or made by hand (a hazardous procedure). Recreational hunters? They really ought to know better. Shooting at animals will only be a sport when the animals get to shoot back.

#81: Sliding motion measurement

Optical mice use imaging and digital processing technology to track movements with a spatial precision of about 1000 dpi.

Today’s invention is a range of new uses for this technology, based on moving some surface across a stationary, inverted mouse -or at least the optical internals thereof.

This might enable a system, consisting of an array of such sensors, to recognise large scale hand gestures or, if embedded in a car headrest and steering wheel, it could record movements of the driver’s head and hands (as mentioned here).

The technology might be employed to record eg the number of times a particular door opened.

As a measure of audience engagement, the technology might be embedded in the seats of an auditorium or a cinema in order to record the frequency and extent to which people shift their seating positions. Imagine the dollar value of knowing exactly which ten minutes to edit out of a movie, based on the movements of its test audience.

With practice, it can even record the number of eyeblinks per second and drive an on-screen cursor by following, albeit crudely, eye movements (don’t try this at home).

#80: Dust-excluding lens changer

I’m looking forward to the day when a single, adaptive camera lens will be smart enough to take whatever image I need (that day is coming, albeit slowly. See this for example).

Until then, changing lenses is still going to be a painful process in which you run the risk of coating your sensor array with dust particulates which are invisible -until your photos are viewed on a big screen.

So, today’s invention is to adapt the idea behind the old-fashioned spherical/rotary lens changer on microscopes, for retro-fit use on digital SLR’s. This allows lenses to be substituted, whilst keeping the instrument’s interior pristine.

No-one wants to have to carry all their lenses on the camera though.

The invention would therefore have to be a bayonet-fit device, attached once to the camera body (in as near sterile conditions as possible). The simplest form would resemble a linearly sliding, rectangular ‘sluice gate’ or guillotine with two apertures – of the type used in old slide projectors (shown from above, in red).

A substitute lens can be slotted into one side of the gate, whilst still wearing its own cap on the camera-facing end. The gate can then be slid across the camera body until the new lens locks into place. At no point is the camera body left open to the atmosphere. If you were being ultra careful, the gate movement itself might be used to create a small, transient internal overpressure, making life even harder for any specks determined to get inside.

The camera-facing caps on the lenses could be made to slide radially off and on, driven by the motion of the gate itself, without ever exposing the internals of your expensive optics.

#79: Motion-blur avoidance

Almost every new digital camera now has an image stabilisation option to allow the user to take handheld shots, with a giant telephoto lens, more or less in the dark. These seem to work based on tiny gyroscopes that react against camera motion by sending a signal, via a servomotor, to move the sensor plane in the opposite direction. If I’d suggested that level of complexity, people might well have quibbled.

One possible approach is to use postprocessing (deconvolution) techniques (if you know the path taken, you can mathematically ‘retrace the steps’ of the camera’s motion and subtract their effect at each point). But if you aren’t taking pictures of eg stars, often the path of the motion is unknown.

So today’s invention is an alternative process which makes use of the fact that multiple digital shots are free. Even my Canon A700 can take about 5, 640×480 shots per second, at 1/400 sec (with flash disabled).

-Take a sequence of such short-exposure images (each of which will look almost uniformly black)
-Locate the peak of intensity in each, using a very simple in-camera program
-Align the peaks and add the images together, so as to create a bright image, without motion blur

(If you were prepared to live with lower-resolution images, you could of course just shoot video, rather than multiple timed exposures).

#78: In-car ANPR

Automated number plate recognition systems have always been expensive to install, temperamental to commission and sensitive to any slight differences in font between the plates of neighbouring nations.

Now, technology exists to overcome all these difficulties. Today’s invention is a way to provide on-board ANPR for all cars that are fitted with satnav devices. Each would carry a cheap webcam (or two) which would look at surrounding plates and decide, using software running on a small in-car computer, whether any of these plates was one currently being targetted by security forces.

On finding such a plate, the system would transmit its location (and possibly also its current speed).

For more information on how this can be achieved today, please contact me via pra@patrickandrews.com

#77: Aerial wind farm

Wind energy is obviously valuable but limited by the fact that not everywhere with a pressing need to operate the toaster has sufficient wind speed to justify spending $20M on a windfarm (Doubling wind speed creates an eight-fold increase in potential power output).

Windspeed basically increases with altitude, so that jet steams, at about five miles up, can be moving at 300 MPH.

Today’s invention: Imagine piggybacking a redundant airliner (as in the early days of space shuttle testing), stripped of non-essential components, to an altitude of five miles or so.

The airliner could be equipped with a very large set of turbine blades (which would fold out once the machine had been released from the piggyback plane and tethered to the earth using draglines, like a large kite). Inside, there would be a gearbox and an ac generator. These days we are actively planning carbon-nanotube space elevators, so much of this technology is not actually rocket science).

The result would be massively efficient, renewable energy output (via electric cables down a tether cable)…also there would be few complaints about unsightly turbines, or the impact on birdlife. And if the wind speed drops off? Well, you could run the fans and generator backwards for a while on electricity previously harvested to big batteries on the ground.

I just discovered this…hope they aren’t thinking of applying for a patent!

#76: Brainstorm tool

I spend a fair amount of time brainstorming, both ‘on-fees’ and in the back of my mind -it’s my default mode of thinking. There is something special, ie emergent, about the combination of brain processes that occurs when people are encouraged to shout out ideas whilst reading and listening to other people’s suggestions.

I’m always looking for ways to help enhance ideas generation. Today’s invention is a combination of tools which already exist. This is aimed at allowing people, who may be geographically remote from each other, to contribute to a brainstorming session. This way you don’t have to rely solely on the five or six people who happen to available in Company X on the afternoon in question: they are almost never the best equipped.

Each person would wear a headset into which they bawl their single-phrase contributions in the usual way and which allows them to hear the inputs of others. These words are converted by speech-to-text software and displayed as a ‘cloud’ on the screens of contributors, deliberately delayed by a second or two.

In addition, word association software could be used to spot links between elements in the existing cloud and distantly related ideas…and to display these as if they were the input of some extra, supersmart participant.

#75: Camera return details

As digital cameras get smaller, so the chances of them being left behind in restaurants or in taxis tend to increase. Although the hardware will soon be almost disposable, the images on board can still be very valuable.

I’m optimistic enough to still think that, in the event of me forgetting some possession, someone might actually try to return it to me. I discovered recently, however, that there is no easy way to store my contact details in my new camera -short of carving my email address into the rather attractive steel casing.

Today’s invention is therefore to equip new digital cameras (those without keypads, anyway) with the ability to store one, read-only image. This could be of eg a business card or other contact information stored on the day of purchase and remaining as startup image forever. You might even choose to include details about a reward for the safe return of your stuff.