Category: Feasible inventions

In the eternal search for that perfect domain name, memorability is a much-prized commodity. pa.com is cool: p.r.andrews-enterprises-limited2001.co.uk isn’t.

Even though new top-level domains will have to come on-stream, so that all those smartifacts can be networked, there will always be opportunities for enhanced functionality.

Today’s invention is a way to create ultra-small urls for your online stuff. You can tell people that your site is located at eg p~a.com. The ‘~’ is of course not legal within domains, but it’s a way of expressing the actual location: www.poiuytrewa.com -a name that nobody wants.

This allows a visitor to run their fingers over all the keys between the two end letters, according to a simple, fixed algorithm, and thus make use of a low-value domain name, expressable in a compact shorthand. So z~u.com would actually mean zxcvbhu.com (a little known Polish curse).

This approach could also be used by all those benighted individuals who think that keyboard shortcuts are a good idea.

I’m reliably informed that night-time sentry duty is particularly hard work if you happen to find yourself in some branch of the military. Needless to say, night is exactly when an alert watch is most required by one’s comrades-in-khaki.

Aside from the itchy uniform and the extreme boredom, sentries suffer from hallucinations. Nothing to do with a bracing pint or two in the mess, anyone who stares at a randomly textured field will start to see predominantly the faces of people and animal shapes. It’s not clear why, but if you look at white noise on a screen, viewed slightly defocussed, a similar thing happens (at about every third fixation).

Such visions are known to cause rookie soldiers, who have been watching a darkened beach or forest or field, to start firing -afraid that they are under attack by people they believe are real. Today’s invention attempts to overcome this (interesting) problem.

The sentry is equipped with a foot-operated switch which briefly activates a bright lamp situated at some distance from him and pointing in the direction of his view. This keeps him largely unseen, and may startle or blind any real assailants whilst destroying any illusory ones.

Those circular-bladed pizza cutters just don’t work at all well. That sharp blade is just as likely to carve one’s fingers or drag splinters of the worksurface into your dinner. When trying to hack through a baked section of crust, armoured in pepperoni, the force required is quite enough to propel an entire pizza off the plate and into your lap.

So, today’s invention is a simple metal asterisk: a star formed from six (or more) metal blades joined at their intersection and pressed into a pizza base before it’s loaded with miscellaneous (undefined) toppings and placed in the oven. This would have saw teeth on the lower edges and thus nearly penetrate the base -dividing it into equal segments, pre cooking.

In a family in which appetities for pizza differ, the segments’ sizes could be made non-uniform, simply by bending the metal blades to different angles of separation or by placing the cutter off- centre on the pizza.

Before serving, each asterisk would be extracted for reuse, leaving easy-to-separate perforations in the doughy discus.

Joking aside, even the most erratically-inclined people are very bad at behaving in ways that are genuinely random.

When you need your next action to be unpredictable by someone else, the universal tendency to fall into an established pattern of behaviour can be a problem. It’s not so important if you are only playing rock, paper, scissors but it may be critical if you happen to be a potential kidnap or assassination target (and being monitored, for long periods, by well-organised assailants).

Today’s invention is an electronic diary planner which chooses, with equal probability and as close to realtime as possible, which of n possible activities/appointments you will undertake, in what order, using what vehicles and via what route(s).

Obviously, the more senior people are, the later these choices can be made because their hosts will be more willing to accommodate last-minute schedule changes (This however effectively terminates the old practice of having weeks’ notice during which to paint everything anew before the visiting head of state appears in an open coach).

As well as making it almost impossible to mount any kind of planned ambush, this has the added advantage that there will be no paper-based itinerary (to be mislaid on a train) weeks ahead of some supposedly low-profile visit.

I must have almost fallen off stepladders more than a dozen times, just managing to reassert equilibrium at the last minute and thus avoiding serious injury. Actually, I think that the fear reaction on each occasion has heightened my sense of vulnerability and caused me to take extra care subsequently -even when when at limited altitudes.

Anyway, today’s invention is a simple way to reduce the chances of falling off such a ladder sideways: my most common near-miss mechanism.

Each step ladder would have holes in the (extruded, box-section aluminimum) legs within a cm or so of the ground. The ladder would come supplied with two additional lengths of the same material which can be easily passed through these holes, as shown. These beams would be rotated to lock in position.

Even aggressive rocking or overreaching by someone at the top of the ladder would not therefore be able to lift any of the feet more than a tiny distance off the ground.

Wine is in many respects a great boon…until it ends up on your new carpet, bed, lapel, irreplaceable family heirloom etc.

Kids have known about nospill cups for a long time but adults are so desperate to look sophisticated (whilst drinking?) that they eschew plastic, lidded beakers.

Today’s invention is a glass with an internal sealing mechanism. Press the stem button to fill it or drink from it. When it’s not pressed, the contents are sealed inside, safe from being splashed around.

99% of wall paintings and graffiti are ugly, inarticulate and a waste of paint. Very occasionally, I’ll spot an advertising, artistic or even a political mural that really works, in the sense of actually conveying an effective, thoughtful or emotional message.

Today’s invention is a device which will allow the reproduction of a digital picture, in paint, at a greatly increased scale from that of the original. There are lots of systems which use a Wii Remote device to create images on a screen. Here, instead, the wii is attached to an airbrush which has multiple paint reservoirs. A user can wave the airbrush across a surface, without having to exercise any particular finescale control.

The Wii sensor detects where the Wii (and airbrush) are pointing and passes that information to a laptop. This decides what colour should be used for the patch of surface currently being addressed. A multi-way valve is then operated to determine which paint to use from moment to moment.

This would allow the reproduction of great works of art semiautomatically on otherwise unattractive buildings. Equipped with a CAD model of a non-flat surface, it might even be able to paint such images on a car or the side of a commercial vehicle.

It can be hard for children to understand even the early stages of arithmetic. If they don’t get these right, then anything subsequently involving numeracy will always be a struggle. One way to help, might be to link more directly the symbolic representations eg ‘9’, ‘two’ etc with counters of the type commonly used in primary schools.

Today’s invention is a game-like animated program which could run on eg any flavour of OLPC machine. Numbers would be represented as a queue of iconic people or bars or blobs (the child could decide). So something like 5+3 could be shown as equivalent to the joining of ||||| and ||| . These bars might bump into each other and swap positions, to provide some identification -and indicate commutativity. These counters would be animated in 3-D so that a scene containing them could be zoomed around at will. Operations like 131+255 which are scarily hard to visualise mentally could then be controlled and manipulated externally on the screen.

Higher numerical concepts such as the square root could be shown as a field of counters being reduced to a smaller square in one corner. This approach would help avoid obviously wrong numerical results by making them visually implausible and emphasise the importance of anticipating a calculation’s output. Reducing the importance of abstract symbol manipulation (algorithm execution), in favour of understanding the concepts would also be a good way to prime children for rational thinking in general.