Category: Feasible inventions

It’s sometimes quite disturbing to see the amount of food wasted in a large canteen when the trays are returned to the trolleys. Maybe people turn out to be less hungry than they thought they were, but I suspect it’s due to a combination of standardised portion sizes and unappetising fodder.

Today’s invention attempts to address the latter problem.

Trays would be provided, as often happens now, with a space for each component of a meal (ie meat, vegetables, salad, dessert, drink container etc). They would be made in translucent material. Servers would be shown which recess should accommodate which component for each sitting. (The trays themselves might actually be available in big-recess and little-recess variants, in order to limit the first problem mentioned above).

After each meal, trays would be returned to a conveyor belt for cleaning, instead of being piled on trolleys. The conveyor would allow trays to be placed on it in only one orientation (by the use of eg moulded-in lugs). Each tray would then be illuminated from below and viewed by an overhead camera. The amount left of each component could then be measured by standard image processing techniques.

This would allow a very rapid assessment of what parts of a meal were well received and thus guide future menu design in order to lessen waste in a very cost-conscious application. Evidence of a failure to choose eg salad or fruit could then also be used to drive healthy eating education programmes.

One of the biggest commercial questions of the age is

“How the hell can we get those people to stop fast forwarding through our beloved TV advertisements?”

Todays’ invention attempts to deal with the underlying problem. No, I don”t mean the really underlying problem that companies still think it’s a great idea to force their potential customers to watch promotional material when they are trying to be entertained.

The thing about fast forwarding through advertisements is that you really have to pay close attention; otherwise you find yourself skipping into Part 3 after the break. So, imagine shooting a couple of seconds of mind-blowing ad action and then broadcasting it in slo-mo.

First, somene watching the ad in realtime will think “What’s going on here, has my recorder blown a circuit?”…so, now you’ve got their attention. Then, they will do the usual thing of fast forwarding…at which point they will see a short burst of normal promotional action. “Acme sugar water -get’s you up to speed.”

Sneaky? and of course it will only work a few times, but it might just keep a few of those Madison Avenue types in in Dom Perignon for one more season.

There is a whole world of investment going on just to get people to pay attention to advertisements.

Actually of course, attention isn’t really enough; they need to achieve emotional engagement. A recent article in the New York Times (which will probably disappear behind the subscription barrier by the time anyone reads this) describes some of these efforts to create and retain customers who are ‘tech-savvy’ enough to view material in a variety of different formats.
“…many networks hope to engage viewers during commercial breaks is by wedging original content into the blocks of advertising time, so that viewers will anticipate seeing something fun if they sit through (sic) a few ads”.

I don’t believe that it’s great customer service to ask people to endure the experience of being advertised at…great ads are fun in themselves.

Today’s invention attempts to achieve a higher level of personalised engagement with eg TV commercials by the new technique of ‘Person Placement‘ (notice the deliberate absence of a stupid little ‘TM’ at the end).

Now that it’s becoming easier to create yourself a little online avatar that really looks like you physically, people could elect to have theirs appear in ads (or a slimmer, more tanned version). When viewing someone driving the new Lextar 400 convertible gliding along on the sunlit freeway, that guy at the wheel in the shades, with the blonde woman -could be you.

Imagine the voiceover saying “How is the new car [yourname]?”  Your avatar turns and smiles and lipsynchs direct to camera…” It feels sooo great “.

Document shredders seem to work fine, as far as they go, but if you have serious need to destroy printed information, it may be necessary to take more drastic steps to thwart the brigades of phishers and espionage agents lurking around your rubbish bins.

Today’s invention is a machine which combines the following techniques to stop the revival of postmortem paperwork.

Overprinting
Imagine a printer which undertakes the security role of a shredder. (Actually, my current printer shreds quite a lot of the paper I feed into it, but that’s a different story). This device would overprint information appearing on a page. Since the ink itself is a major cost consideration, the overprinting wouldn’t be just a complete blacking out but would be targetted (using a simple lightbeam shone through the paper) at the edges between print and whitespace.

For a more sophisticated approach, a small scanner could be used to recognise page content and deal with each item more effectively. This would be driven by an inversion of OCR technology: if the machine has a model of what makes certain characters differentiable from others, it can mask those features preferentially.

Randomised chopping
Conventional shredders do a nice line in cutting paper into neat little strips. The cutters are pretty uniformly spaced, making it easier for determined miscreants to paste them back together. An alternative would be to do the cutting using a very fine waterjet (or even a laser). The advantage of this approach would be that just as with overprinting, the cutting could be directed so as to chop the paper in a content-dependent way. This would mean cutting long words into more fragments than short ones, for example.

A combination of content-dependent overprinting and cutting would obviously make reassembly that much more time consuming. Although this system would need to work one sheet at a time, at least it wouldn’t self destruct at the first sign of a residual staple.

Record companies are in trouble.

If they go bust, so they tell us, it will be the end of all music (not to mention civilisation as we know it). The reason is simple, they spent money on promoting pap, whilst forgetting about investing in product research. Think of any failing industry and that will probably be the reason. One of the product features they forgot about was security: too late now to pay those PhD’s to come up with secure DRM tools -way too late.

Today’s invention is an alternative approach to shore up the market position of big labels. Now that everyone can make multiple copies of all digital media, essentially for nothing, I suggest that a vital way to add real value is to offer personalisation.

People would be able to visit a website and mix their own, unique version of any recording in the catalogue (by ticking boxes for eg timed effects and adjusting processing sliders for each channel) . These would then be downloadable -on payment of a realistic price (perhaps a few dollars per track). Obviously the individual digital channel outputs and the tool itself would not be made publicly available.

Complete tracks would of course then be freely copiable, but real fans would still want their own personal version(s). The interface might also allow for a kind of karaoke, with the customer recording his/her own version in concert with the chosen artist(s).

Those record stores still in existence could provide advice services in connection with the use of the interface. Artists might even choose to meet, and perhaps duet, with fans who had made credible variants of their work.

My otherwise blameless copy of Ubuntu is running all the fans in my laptop as if it were still configured for Africa. This creates an unnecessary rustling noise that sounds like I’m on a flight back from there (actually my laptop never moves far from a wall socket, since its battery gave out).

The last thing I want at this point is to start plugging in various USB fan coolers: it needs its own aircon supply. On this theme, I notice that HP are rumoured now to be providing laptops with silent, liquid cooling systems.

I don’t imagine this will be available as a retro-fit, somehow.

So, today’s invention is a do-it-yourself alternative. I’ve placed my machine on an open Tupperware box so that air can flow in over the top edge via the gap left by the removed battery compartment. Into the box I place each morning a couple of those cold box refrigerant bricks. The air which enters the fan intake is thus up to 2 degrees C lower than ambient (and significantly less humid, judging by the condensation on the bricks). This situation can be sustained for about 1/2 day at a time, until the iceblocks warm up and need to be replaced.

It may not be all that convenient, but it is a cheap and silent life preserver for my hardpressed silicon/germanium.

I’ve been experimenting with a variety of different lacing patterns for my battered old New Balance trainers. I find that even though these are ‘H’ width fitting, my feet can still become seriously uncomfortable as they hammer the pavement and squish sideways. (I happen to have short, ultra broad feet with a very high instep).

In the end, I settled for a normal ladder type lacing pattern across the upper half of my shoes and no laces at all across the bottom half.

This actually works surprisingly well; holding the footwear in place whilst still allowing my feet to do their sideways squish on impact. It could still be better though.

Today’s invention is to make running shoes which have, say, eight sets of opposed laceholes, as usual, but instead of having one continuous lace per shoe, provide the wearer with eight separate lace loops. Each loop would join two opposite holes but provide 8 independent tensions across the foot. The loops could be held firm by a smaller variant on existing lace locks.

Although perhaps slightly more fiddly to tie up, these lacelets could provide a much more ‘tailored’ fit. For perfectionists, they might even be made available in different elasticities for different positions on each foot.

Everyone who has neighbours knows the annoyance that car and burglar alarms cause. Whether they ever cause annoyance to any kind of thieves is highly debatable, but they certainly never inspire me to call the police (since they are usually triggered by cats or rain). This is true even if they wake me at 2am and continue to ring until the batteries discharge (or the sun burns out -whichever seems to take longer).

Today’s invention is a simple remedy for we sleep deprived.

If people must fork out for alarms that are more expensive than the property they pretend to protect, I propose a small modification.

When you buy an alarm system, it should be equipped with a fixed limit on how long it will ring when activated (maybe 3 minutes, max). At the end of this period it would stop ringing and issue a verbal message which the owner could prerecord ( a little like an urgent form of answerphone message). This could be simply “Someone is interfering with Bill’s car” or “Call Hometown 236 1357” or even, for Texans “You are being observed through the sights of my Smith & Wesson…now git”.

Alarms might be made as personal and polyphonic as ringtones so that neighbours could decide whether to call police, based on how friendly the owner of a particular siren is.

I’m concerned about ‘soft’ drinks.

Leaving aside the stories of what Nutrasweet does to rats, even the effects which a canful of ‘natural, wholesome’ sugar has on my children are disturbing. These include being hyperexcited and completely incapable of focusing (especially on tasks which require even limited concentration). If you know children labeled as having ADD, then consider whether they are just taking too much sugar on board, before letting them be treated with Ritalin et al.

Today’s invention is a way to help wean children off highly-sugared drinks.

Each case of 12 cans or bottles would be identically branded as usual, but they would carry a small printed number from 1 to 12 on the outside. This would reflect the amount of sugar inside, so that when fed these, in order of decreasing sugar, young people could be weaned off that taste and associated rush.

It would mean manufacturers cooperating in filling cans appropriately and creating a ‘low-sweetness’ range of drinks onto which people could then migrate. This approach might be extended to eg alcohol content in a pack of beer (or even, heaven help us, caffeine content).