Home Archive by category "Feasible inventions" (Page 43)

Category: Feasible inventions

#1746: LighterSlicer

If you are an outdoors type, rather than a glamour camper, you will be unwilling to carry even one gramme more equipment than necessary (I’m told the SAS trim the handles on their toothbrushes to save weight).

Today’s invention is a new sheath for one’s camp knife which takes this into account.

This is made of strong plastic and has the sides omitted, thus protecting the blade whilst lessening the user’s load.

The added advantage is that if you need a tool to eg chop sticks, these can be inserted into the gap under the sheath (via the hinged flap (blue)).

The knife can then be struck hard on its pommel, eg with a rock, forcing the blade to guillotine whatever it comes in contact with.

#1745: SleepSlope

There is a serious shock to the system of many people twice a year when the clocks are moved forward or back.

Today’s invention is an electronic clock which offers an alternative to the normal step change.

The indicated time would be gradually advanced or retarded, according to a sigmoid curve, over the course of a long weekend.

This would allow those of us who are super-sensitive to the amount of sleep we get some extra time to adjust.

It would also mean that the greatest amount by which we’d be out of step would be 30 mins -at a time when punctuality is less vital than during the working week.

#1738: Flatflex

I saw some elastic bands recently designed to take up the shape of various animals etc in 2-D.

Today’s invention is to apply this idea to power cords for all sorts of electrical equipment.

The cord would be coated in a slightly stiffer than normal rubberised outer layer. It would thus be maintained in a planar layout, making it much more difficult to trip over and almost impossible to form tangles.

An appliance would still have some flexibility to be moved a small distance away from the wall socket, without drastically distorting the 2-D shape.

This could obviously be used to promote some related product by embodying a logo or message.

#1736: JamSpreader

Autonomous vehicles are only just beginning to become a reality. Although there are many potential safety benefits, the general problem of how to avoid motorised mayhem is by no means solved.

Today’s invention is a local application of autonomous vehicle technology.

When a tailback occurs, many vehicles are travelling close together at low speed. There is always a lot of braking and acceleration which is unnecessary -caused by amplification of small overcorrections by distracted or tired human drivers (as well as speculative lane changing).

Today’s invention is an electronic control unit, fitted to vehicles, which senses that the car has been involved for say, 30 seconds, in a regime of slow motion and/or start/stop driving.

On receipt of signals from neighbouring cars that they too have sensed this regime, their electronic boxes would take over throttle and brakes, coordinating them across a whole traffic stream (it would also restrict steering to maintain parallel traffic flow).

This low-speed cruise control would constrain all vehicles to move at a near-uniform, speed without the usual risky and inefficient high levels of acceleration and braking. Just attempting to maintain equal distance from trailing and leading vehicles would probably work at low speeds.

This would then allow speed to build up smoothly, together with separation distance, so that a tailback or jam could disperse with maximal ease.

#1735: HandleBandit

Today’s invention is a generic door handle for use in hotels and casinos throughout towns like Las Vegas.

This would operate as a normal handle, but, if you wanted to, you could put a coin, token or even an access card in an integral slot in the latch mechanism.

This would activate a small fruit machine display, so that even passing through a door would be part of the gambling experience and offer the chance of a payout.

#1726: TumblerTower

Today’s invention is a modification to an undergraduate drinking game, based on the famous Jenga.

Normally, I’m told, you have to have a drink, by way of forfeit, when you move blocks other than the one you are trying to extract. Instead, I suggest that whoever extracts a block correctly can pass it to the player of their choice, who then has to take a drink. This comes from inside the extracted brick.

The bricks are made of plastic and each has a hollow core and a sealable bung, which allows them to hold a variable amount of alcoholic or other beverage, chosen by the hosts, before a game commences.

Some of the blocks would be transparent and some opaque, so that players would have a varying amount of knowledge about their contents. The variation in weight, and hence frictional resistance to being removed, would add an extra degree of difficulty.

#1724: EvenEvent

So it seems that there maybe some unfairness involved in athletics track design. Perhaps left handers are disadvantaged by having to run counterclockwise.

A figure-of-eight track would be possible but would lead to collisions with lapped runners (or if using an overpass, questions about the effects of uphill vs downhill).

Today’s invention is a way to even up any such imbalance.

Since running around circular curves at constant speed requires, according to simple Physics, no expenditure of work beyond overcoming friction in the direction of motion, I’ve assumed that there is no difference between running bends of differing radius.

The problem of fair track design thus becomes one of ensuring equal total stretches of left- and right-handedness.

The shape above provides this, together with straight sections for sprint events.

#1721: Centricarrier

I was fascinated when I first learned about objects which have a centre of mass outside themselves.

Today’s invention is a system for carrying a lot of shopping that exploits this kind of geometry.

It consists of a C-shaped trough carried using a pair of padded shoulder straps. This allows a shopper to stand inside the C and thus support the weight of the goods. It also allows reaching for stuff with both hands and with none of the arm strain associated with a heavy basket.

Items of shopping could be placed in this, as a substitute for a hard-to-steer shopping trolley, and then carried home in it (with a suitable zip-on weather cover).

Ths would provide some exercise, as well as an indication during shopping of the weight of goods which would have to be carried home (or hoisted into a car).

#1717: CrowdCount

Counting the numbers of people in crowds is apparently an increasingly contentious task -given that these estimates are used as a proxy for the strength of feeling behind a range of political causes.

There are already numerous ways to count heads -the most sensible approach seems to me to be to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk process.

Rather than ask the human operatives who do this work, each to count a whole crowd, today’s invention hands each of them only a small part of an aerial photo of the event (taken by a UAV, if necessary)

Where can you find a collection of willing counters? Send the snapshots to the smartphones of members of the crowd itself (perhaps by displaying a phone number on a hoarding which people in the crowd walk past). They might then enter a draw for some event-relevant prize.

The result would be that each subsection of crowd could be counted by ten of its members, resulting in much higher accuracy.

It could be argued that people on a march might be inclined to overestimate the figures, so this effect could be measured by passing certain calibration shots to distant analysts. A better solution, however, would be to exchange pictures between unrelated events.

#1714: ReachRover

If you want to have a military vehicle which can successfully traverse hilly, rough terrain, as well as high-tail it (stably) down a motorway, compromises about wheelbase length usually have to be made.

Today’s invention offers a new way to think about this problem.

A wheeled digger-type vehicle could be converted to a variable-wheelbase machine by providing it with a set of road wheels which could be easily clamped to the bucket at the front.

Press down with the bucket controls and the front wheels lift off the surface, allowing the machine to move on the bucket wheels and rear wheels only.

Varying the reach of the bucket provides the possibility of changing the wheelbase whilst in motion.