Category: Feasible inventions

When trying to get myself up in the morning, I find it all too easy to ignore my alarm.

Today’s invention is simply an alarm clock into which one can record a personal wake-up message (perhaps even each night). The most effective approach would probably take into account that we respond preferentially to hearing our own name, even if the volume of the speech is low.

So, I’d have eg my mother record ‘Wake up patrick’ on my behalf and this should achieve a greater level of attention than any amount of clanging bells.

Imitation plants and flowers can now be made so convincing as to be indistinguishable from the real thing -at least until inspected using a magnifying glass. Convincing visually, but maybe not in other ways.

Today’s invention is a pot for imitation plants which contains a reservoir of oxygen, water and a scent chosen to match the inserted plant. The gas propels the scent and small amounts of water vapour into the local atmosphere, according to a daily cycle, providing many of the extra benefits which living vegetation can.

A deluxe version might incorporate a plant with small paper flowers which open over time (by gradual absorption of the expelled water vapour, perhaps). The pot might even contain a small carbon dioxide scrubber unit to help further freshen the air.

For families that like to undertake outdoor spectating together, today’s invention is a large poncho with multiple flaps. This allows people of all different heights to stand or sit together in the rain and select the aperture to open which best corresponds to the position of their face.

People can thus share some body heat whilst watching storm-tossed sporting events or air displays, or rain-threatened outdoor performances of any kind.

It also offers a way to ensure that offspring stay within a safe distance of their parents.

Having glimpsed bits of the Olympics I’ve been surprised that the shooting events don’t seem to include some element of moving target work (even medieval archery used pendula). That would surely be a much more natural test of marksmanship than hammering pellets into a single stationary bullseye.

Today’s invention is a computer-driven target which moves within a fixed radius but with the centre point executing some form of random walk. The radius of movement could be varied dependent upon the distance from the target. Also the frequency of direction change might follow a Levy flight pattern.

This would provide a more challenging task than firing at a fixed setup and it could be proved to be fair to all competitors as well as being statistically more meaningful (assuming a sufficiently long window for firing was allowed and a greater number of shots).

As someone who appreciates Orwell as much as I do, I’m often concerned about the number of ‘security’ cameras which scan the public spaces I visit. Actually the number of cameras is not so relevant as who is watching/recording their outputs -and why.

The best security is surely obtained when people don’t have a reason to behave badly. Failing a universal outbreak of fairness and moderation, however, today’s invention is a way to make better use of security camera feeds.

When developing open-source software, many eyes tend to spot problems more easily than a single observer. I therefore advocate making the images from all security cameras publically available.

People who wanted to make a contribution to a nation’s security, at a time of heightened threat, could register, view the faces of a few hundred wanted individuals online and then observe camera images for any evidence of their appearance. This has got to be at least as interesting as existing ‘reality tv shows’ and with a possibly significant payoff.

Each scrutiny session might only be a few minutes long but just the fact that they are potentially being watched, would increase the nervousness of terrorists or criminals. Anyone behaving in a ‘suspicious’ way might cause viewers to press an alert button. The local police would only be notified if more than say 5% of watchers agreed (making it very hard for organised criminals to overload the sytem with bogus alerts).

The world of Science is dependent on citing references within publications. The number of citations (and journal in which it appears) are often used as some kind of assessment of each paper. Papers however can be referred to for reasons other than their quality or the positive influence they may have had on the thinking of subsequent authors.

Today’s invention is therefore a system which encourages an author to add information to each reference which says why the citation occurred. At its simplest, each reference could be tagged with symbols which reflect the extent to which it reports novel(N), professionally-undertaken(P) and important work(I). There might also be symbols for “my findings support those of this paper” and vice versa. Each of these signs might also be given a quantitative measure of the extent to which they applied (ie 5I=>”very important work”).

All of this could be made compatible with the semantic web (as currently under construction) and thus allow more meaningful, up to date rating of the cumulative value of an author’s contributions.

Now that fuel is at a ridiculous price, criminals need to be deterred from hijacking roadgoing tankers and stealing their contents.

Today’s invention is a simple mechanical keypad lock applied to the outlet valve of a tanker. This would be made extremely attack-resistant and the combination reset daily. Although few crooks would be daft enough to try using a flame cutter to remove it, even using a hammer and chisel might result in a spark and a truly massive explosion.

Filling stations would be replenished in a sequence that would be hard for a small team of external observers to detect. The combination required to open the lock on a particular day would be called, or texted, through to a particular filling station. Similarly, the address of the target station would be called to the tanker driver only after departure. This would make it futile to stop the truck and threaten the driver or to work out which station to visit and threaten the staff to revel the combination.

Buying a fresh bread stick is a great luxury as far as I’m concerned. I know the French often eat theirs en route from the shop, but I like to get mine home in one piece. Given the mechanical properties and geometry of such bread, I rarely manage to arrive chez moi without snapping each loaf into at least two sections.

Today’s invention is therefore a simple protectif-de-pain. It takes the form of a long, thin foil bag, closed at one end. When the bread is inserted into the bag (which can be reused) a small hand-operated air pump (of the kind used to seal a half-consumed bottle of wine) is used to evacuate the bag. This is then knotted tightly and placed on sale in the usual way.

The partial vacuum within the bag allows external air pressure to rigidify the exterior foil skin, rendering it much more nearly impervious to collisions with the inside of the shopping trolley or car boot.

It also retains more moisture (and tasty smell) than any paper bag can, which adds value to the product in excess of the cost of the mass-produced bag.

Everybody would like their laptop battery to last longer.

Today’s invention is one way to allow that. Normally, when left alone for a while, one’s screen will dim. I suggest applying that by default to all screen real estate, apart from the active window. The screen would thus use a great deal less energy, at the expense of a small amount of extra control circuitry/logic.

It might be possible to have different windows with varying levels of local illumination, depending for example on the recency of last usage (although I can’t think why this would be useful, other than for aesthetic marketing reasons when the machine was on display -or perhaps to draw attention to different windows in a particular order).