Today’s invention is a roof tile which has a water channel formed within it.
As tiles are placed overlapping each other, the outlet from one plugs into and seals to the inlet of the one below.
This allows water to be fed into the roof surface at the top and extracted from the bottom, after having absorbed large amounts of solar energy.
Statues are pretty much still artefacts of the stone age.
Today’s invention is to create civic statues of much respected people so that they incorporate some robotic components.
This would allow a repertoire of small movements to replicate some of the physical characteristics of the individual in question. These might be triggered by people passing by or on detecting certain spoken phrases.
No need for an all-singing, all-dancing, uncanny-valley replica, but enough to preserve more of the memory of the real person than marble or bronze can achieve.
Happy New Year, Readers!
Today’s invention is a website which helps guests at public functions to choose what to wear so that they don’t clash with or duplicate each other’s outfits. This would also help make sure that no guest was more grandly or eye-catchingly clad than any guests of honour.
A seating plan would also be provided to all participants, in advance. They would then each choose eg the colour of their dress from a palette, ensuring at least that their immediate neighbours were not planning to wear the same.
To minimise conflicts, guests would only receive their tickets after having provided data about their planned couture (which would be confirmed on entry).
More A-list events might even allow specification of the designers and the style of clothes.
The website could also be used to eradicate the problem of several people appearing in group photographs, dressed like a barber’s shop quartet.
Today’s invention is based on people in wheelchairs carrying with them smartphones which can record or transmit their location.
These data would reflect, over time, those routes and destinations that enabled wheelchair access and could be overlaid onto eg Google StreetView (especially future versions which map the interiors of public buildings).
Areas which failed to be mapped would highlight regions from which wheelchair users were possibly being excluded.
Today’s invention is bicycle handlebars which can be reconfigured into many different styles.
The front forks are made of tubes in circular arcs. Other tubes are fitted telescopically inside these.
The interior ones can be pulled out almost completely, twisted through an angle and locked in place.
This allows, for example, a more upright riding position (A) or a much more aggressive racing pose (B) -as well as almost any other arrangement in between.
Today’s invention is a propelling ‘pencil’ of the segmented type, except that each of the little units consists of a biro, fibre tip, rollerball or fountain type nib, together with its own small reservoir of appropriate ink.
All nibs could be of different widths and inks of different colours.
Today’s invention is a way for police to retain some kind of human appearance, even when they are wearing protective equipment in expectation of a riot.
Each officer would wear a safety helmet with a lifesize image of his own face affixed to the outside of his face shield.
He or she would still be able to see through eyeholes corresponding to those in the face image itself.
In this way, officers could remain fully protected but still display their identities -and thus be encouraged to behave in a responsible way.
This lack of anonymity would also enable members of a crowd to identify later in videos anyone in uniform who had been misbehaving.
For survivalists and explorers whose lives depend on their equipment, having a knife with a broad tang is important.
This makes it hard to break, but it adds weight and still provides only a single, large blade.
Today’s invention is a knife which has a large tang in which a slot is cut (so that it doesn’t lessen the strength of the unit significantly).
Into the slot is inserted from the far side a multi-tool penknife, one grip of which is expanded to provide the handle for the overall system.
If you need access to a wider range of smaller tools, simply undo the two knurled nuts holding the small tool and grip (blue) in place and detach the main metal work from the penknife/multitool.
I hate folders on my computer desktop. Once you put stuff in there you have to think up a name for all the contents and they suddenly become invisible.
Rather than create a virtual paperclip (Microsoft already messed that one up), today’s invention is a transparent envelope.
Clicking once on the envelope would visually shuffle the contents enough to remind me what was in there. This would allow me to hold together documents of every file type on my desktop in such a way that I can still identify where things are at a glance.
I might later choose to file the results of my work in an old-fashioned folder, but for work in progress a clear envelope would be a useful tool.
Today’s invention is to create a paint tool for Gimp or Photoshop which contains information about paint drying behaviour.
One could specify the properties of the paint so that a realistic drying time would be simulated. This would allow ‘wet’ paint to be manipulated for a while on screen.
It would also be possible to have such virtual paint exhibit smart features, such as a tendency to mix more with some than other colours or to flow depending upon the simulated canvas’ local absorption properties.
Paint colour might even be allowed to change on subsequent viewings, so that a digital picture could bleach realistically when viewed years later.
