Category: Feasible inventions

Another time saver…

I want to propose a footer mechanism in all my email which allows anyone who receives one to click on it and automatically be removed from my address book, so as to never receive email from me again.

I thus save a lot of time by not chasing people who can’t be bothered to reply (You know who you are!).

Unsubscribing from me so comprehensively in this way sends the additional message that what I thought was a mutually valuable last meeting actually left you feeling bored, scared, or just too confused.

For shy people, making the first move towards starting a relationship can be hell.

I suggest the following. People entering a bar or club can send a text message to the number displayed inside. This would consist of their personal profile: yes/no responses to up to a few hundred questions they have previously completed online. The SMS server would find the best match to their character and stated requirements amongst those people presently within the bar.

A previously stored image of the newly arrived person would be sent to the matched person’s phone, who would have the option to say yes to a meeting. If the response is yes, then the matched person’s image would be supplied to the newcomer, giving them say 15 minutes to meet and introduce themselves. If a no were received, the next best match would automatically be sought.

On exit from the bar, each person would be reminded to text a goodbye message, removing their profile from the pool.

This use of technology would perhaps help to remove the over-reliance on appearance which rules out (or dooms) many relationships.

Access to anyone with a medical qualification is getting more difficult: and more expensive (This largely the result of the medical profession’s desperate attempts to maintain its fee rates -£100k on average, even for a caring, professional GP seems seriously wrong. In the UK, these people take no risk and are allowed to police themselves).

One contribution to the problem might be the following. If feeling unwell, people could visit their personal secure webpage on which would be displayed, a zoomable, detailed map of their body. They could use this to log any pains or other problems and provide a detailed description of any illness -just as they would if actually visiting a medic). When I say detailed I mean that they should also have the opportunity of describing how they actually feel -if they have a headache, exactly how is it spatially distributed? Does it seem to have a colour?  When does it bother them most? Is it ‘sharp’ or ‘dull’ or ‘throbbing’ etc.

An expert system, aware of their history and genetic background, would monitor these inputs, ask further questions and alert the individual’s doctor in the case of any rapid change in symptoms. It would also watch for recurrent or correlated problems which may seem insignificant but which form a pattern, over time, that is often hard for a patient to spot.

Other functions might include providing hearing or sight tests on the screen, issuing reminders to an individual to take medication or do some exercise. It might even take in eg retinal imagery via webcam. This system would also gradually gather data from the population as a whole which could be mined for otherwise invisible patterns. Perhaps people who are about to die of a heart attack commonly experience a tingling in their limbs of which doctors are never made aware.

This could save the NHS the cost of a few hospitals per year, as long as it wasn’t implemented by the usual incompetent contractors.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between photography and sculpture. In particular, I’ve been waiting for a software tool that would allow me to take, say, 20 digital photographs (what other kind is there?) and then stitch these together to create a seamless, quasi-continuous CAD-like model capable of showing the object in question from any angle.

I know that there are prototypes available in University labs all over the place -some of them may even work under the right conditions, but life’s too short.

My alternative, quick-and-dirty solution, given that I’m not that good at patience, is to take a picture of an object from almost every possible angle. No interpolation, no frame-to-frame registration difficulties, no advanced algorithms. If you need to know what that junction looks like between those four suspension members near the cylindrical brake cylinder? Simply dial up view number 2,002,003,040,105. Rather than rely on processing all those edges and splines, concentrate instead on memory (especially now that Moore’s law is running out of steam and storage costs are falling).

All these images would be stored by the location, distance and orientation of the camera as it is automatically moved around the object. It might even make sense to do what they do in astronomy and build a camera with multiple CCD sensors, arrayed perhaps in a hemispherical configuration.

What about zooming-in for extra detail? Well, I imagine that all the images would be recorded at some convenient minimum distance (determined by the acuity characteristics of the visual system, perhaps). The only zooming that could occur would then be zooming out. Alternatively, the whole process could be undertaken using handheld movie cameras, creating a convenient, continuous steam of images.

Ultimately, I’d like to see this kind of model displayed in a digital photoframe. Simply turning the frame relative to your viewpoint (monitored by wireless sensors as used in the latest Nintendo devices) would allow a different angle of the object in question to be displayed…in other words, a low-cost, digital hologram.

So is this really a model, in the sense of predicting things previously unknown? Possibly not, but I’m still thinking about that one.

Apologies for my continuing obsession with catflaps. I’ve just remembered that Sir Isaac Newton was once ridiculed for having cut two adjacent catflaps in his door: one large one for his large cat and another, smaller one for his small cat….

Today’s invention addresses several issues with existing commercial designs.

• They are noisy: everyone in my household knows when our cat enters and leaves home in the early hours.
• They are draughty: that flapping two-way gate thing with the magnetic strip is just awful.

So, here is yet another alternative (and one that I’m determined to actually implement).

Make two standard cat-size apertures and insert the outer frame of a standard cat flap into each (Having removed the damn flap from both).

Insert into each aperture the top half of a leg of a pair of old trousers, so that the leg forms a tunnel around the entry. One tunnel should point inwards, the other outwards (a good idea would be to use some waterproofing spray on the leg which lies outside). The cat in question can use one tunnel for entry and the other for exit. Since the material naturally falls closed over the hole in each case -draughts are eliminated as is that dreadful 2am crashing noise.

Training the cat to use these is just a matter of holding the tunnel open a little for a while with a plate of food on either side (I hope).

Obviously the trousers are replaceable, since they also act as fur cleaners, thereby removing the need for all that vacuum cleaner hacking discussed below.

I’ve just spent a few days insulating our loft space in opposition to Winter’s application for permanent residency. I thought, as I sat there with a mouthful of glass fibre, that it would be much more convenient not to have to deal with all that hellish stuff. Mostly, I was working with foil-backed bubble wrap anyway but this material is pretty hard to unroll and cut to shape in the restricted space available.

Today’s invention is to make use of foil balloons instead. When only slightly inflated with air, these are able to maintain their condition for a long time -probably years. (If you were concerned about deflation you could arrange that all of these connect via pipes to a single plenum which would allow convenient repressurisation -but that is way too fussy: the whole point is to keep the balloons at such a small overpressure that deflation takes forever).

These offer the following advantages:

• Flexibility: their small size allows them to be located within very narrow gaps and inflated whilst in place.
• Cheapness: I can buy 18 Bob the Builder balloons for £2 (I’m sure that the price could be slashed by buying Santa balloons in January or something).
• High thermal efficiency: thin layers of air held in place with impermeable foil has got to work.

If you were in search of complete thermal comfort, I’d suggest applying some velcro patches, so that the balloons form a continuous blanket.

It’s been suggested to me that surplus wine box bladders would be an even more effective approach, with the obvious added advantage that a glass or two of wine helps you stay warm whilst doing the work.

I’ve always had trouble developing new motor skills. It took me four attempts to pass the driving test and my inability to learn dancesteps is truly remarkable.

Touch tying is therefore a complete masydteyeu ayuidi dmer (last few words were typed with me looking at the screen, not my fingers).

Invention of the day is therefore a simple feedback mechanism. Direct a webcam onto your hands from above and position the resulting image somewhere near your text editor window. It takes a little getting used to but it seems to work -if you’re as incorrigibly bad at this sort of thing as me.

There may also be some mileage in using audio feedback here. A keyboard with two-stage keys would be capable of ‘saying’ the letter you were just about to get wrong, when its key was only partly depressed.

The sad purveyors of spam have, for some time now, embedded their messages in the graphics of HTML emails. Organisations attempting to filter these out commonly use conventional OCR techniques, but without much success.

I suggest applying a completely new form of software tool to ‘read’ words embedded within graphics: SceneReader

14% of all spending on advertisements in Britain is now invested in online marketing. I expect a lot of that goes on slush funds and junkets to the Maldives, but even so, that’s a hell of a lot of money. I suspect two things are driving this:

1) That more people are frustrated by the low quality of contemporary tv.
2) That advertisers are starting to get the fact that in online advertising, you don’t just fire a campaign out there: you can actually monitor the results in terms of clicks, or even £ spent, as a result.

Which leads me to today’s idea. It’s hardly an invention, more just common sense.

At the moment, whenever I reload this page (with its admittedly diverse content) the ads which our friends at Google send to my browser include:

• one from a driving school
• one from a hotel in Manchester
• one from a vacuum flange manufacturer
• one from a rental villa near Disneyland
• one for some medical gas systems
• one for a red consumer product ‘as seen on tv’ which is so indistinct that it’s unclear what is being sold (maybe the mystery element is supposed to provide an incentive to click?)

Today’s idea is that one way to improve online advertising effectiveness is to place less emphasis on tuning the ad. content to reflect the page content…instead, if I haven’t clicked on an ad. in say the last two or three showings, it can safely be assumed that I’m not interested…so don’t show me that ad. again: ever. This can all be arranged easily via cookies, without placing that much extra strain on anyone’s ad. server. I’d be happy to opt-in, even if a privacy obsessed minority object (do they actually ever buy anything?) Given that the current click-through rate on banner ads is only 0.39%, this must surely be worth a try.