I’m getting sick of people reading over my shoulder documents I write or read eg on planes.
Today’s invention is simply to supply laptops with a pair of ‘blinkers’, making the screen visible only to the rightful user -not adjacent passengers.
These could be made of two opaque sheets of soft plastic hinged to the edges of the screen so that, when closing the machine, the blinkers would fold inwards, forming additional protection for it from the keyboard.
I’ve never warmed to the design of CDs and DVDs. These media are particularly difficult to extract from their cases and insert correctly in a player -without breaking some piece of flimsy plastic or scratching the surface so badly that they never play again. This is especially true of in-car audio where they surely represent more of a hazard, whilst driving, than a mobile phone.
I’d happily advocate MP3 based content on a thumbdrive, but I do realise that the reproduction quality is less good than on an optical disk (even if I can’t hear/see much difference).
So if handling these disks is hard to do: don’t.
Today’s invention is simply to provide jewel cases with an internal bearing for the disk to rotate upon and a window for the laser to shine through when reading the surface…a little like the floppy disks they used to use as long as ten years ago.
I wrote a couple of days ago about a simple system for monitoring the strength of one’s tea, whilst your teabag is brewing in the cup.
Well, it’s time for a return to the exciting arena that is plumbing, by applying a similar approach to the flush toilet.
Imagine a light emitter and receiver pair located on either side of the toilet bowl (underwater). It can arranged that when the toilet is flushed, water only flows until its local optical transmissability returns to a preset level. This means that the flushing terminates a few seconds after the toilet has cleared itself and the remaining water is clean. In this way, massive amounts of water can be saved which would otherwise be wasted.
This would allow the use of a cistern taking the form of a tall, thin, flat-to the wall tank (more like a domestic radiator). If the bowl is sensed not to be not clearing effectively, a valve could be opened wider than normal to allow an inrush of water at much higher than normal pressure (due to the height of the tank).
This would allow the flushing to be adaptive to requirements and lessen the frequency of blockages. It would require a level sensor (or a flowmeter) to ensure that the amount of water supplied was never enough to overflow the toilet.
Anyone who uses public transport may well find themselves standing for a good part of their journey. You can’t make any kind of trip these days without being confronted by rattling, microwheeled suitcases pulled along by extendable handles. When I have to transport smart clothes about in a suitbag or case, they always arrive looking even more crumpled than me.
Today’s invention aims to address both the problems of limited seating and crumpled clothing, by turning the wheeled suitcase into a convenient mobile chair. People often end up sitting on their cases, but it’s certainly not comfortable and it never does the case any good.
A case is shown which consists of a rigid plastic box. This is the shape of a conventional suitbag, in frontal view, but in profile it resembles a playground chute. The box allows clothes to be fed in at the top without crumpling them. The case rolls along on wheels set into the base, propelled and steered by being strapped to a user’s arm. When he/she needs to sit down, the box’s wheels are withdrawn inside and it can be leant against a wall.
The box also has a small inlet in the base via which steam from eg a hotel kettle can be admitted in order to lessen further any tendency to creasing.
When I was a child, the Radiometer was probably the first device that I was aware of which the adults in my family couldn’t explain convincingly. I’m still short of a how-it-works theory which satisfies me, but it forms the basis of today’s invention.
I noticed that the vanes of the radiometer which I was given 30 years ago had recently stopped moving. Wiping a small area of dust from the top caused them suddenly to restart. It occurred to me that here we have a system capable of measuring more than household dust. It is a potential, low cost monitor of airborne pollution.
This is a matter of concern for me because I regularly spend time working by the window of a city centre office which is visibly speckled with sooty particles. Using a suitably calibrated radiometer, I can now be aware quantitatively of the ambient level of atmospheric particulates inside the building -when the vanes become immobile, it’s time to evacuate or activate the expelair.
This simple system incorporates a small fan, to accelerate the deposition of specks on the glass, and a selection of smoked glass filters to boost the sensitivity to their density. This could be supplied to urban schools, for example, in order to protect children from pollution.
I’m always interested in the idea of symmetry. Actually, the real interest is in asymmetry -especially whenever that arises apparently spontaneously.
In today’s world, everyone in the comfy developed countries is exhorted to ‘downsize their carbon footprint’, even if those doing the exhortation have no concept of what that means (suddenly Carbon is a bad thing?).
My proposal is to concentrate on waste and specifically wasting electricity. Today’s invention, without any official hectoring, is simply to create switches for everything electrical which are quite difficult to switch on and very, very easy to flip off. This would cause users to pause and think ‘do I really need to switch the X on?
The difficulty might involve a multi-step ‘on’ process, rather than one involving great amounts of finger strength (think about trying to log off from Windows, where you get asked that infuriating ‘are you sure?’ and imagine applying that to energy-absorbing systems). It might take the form of greater frictional resistance to the movement of a switch, or a sound effect which is a slightly annoying whine in the ‘on’ direction and applause when you switch off. Now that fingerprint readers are available at a few dollars on thumb drives, switches might only activate for certain individuals. (A symmetrical version might even record how many times that person switched on and didn’t switch off).
The asymmetry which any such threshold creates, can perhaps make people think before they act. If this user-unfriendly development had the effect of making people never switch anything off, then each electrical apparatus could be made to automatically deactivate after a certain length of time. This period would have to be set by the user, before the on switch could be activated.
When one’s tyre treads wear down towards the legal limit, it’s not always obvious (until you end up parked in a hedge perhaps).
Today’s invention is a way to become aware of this problem in advance of a terminal loss of traction.
A band of hard plastic would be inserted, during manufacture, in one of the circumferential tread gaps. This would eventually be exposed to the road surface as the surrounding rubber wears away. When this occurs, serrations in the surface of the plastic make a characteristic buzzing noise as the wheels rub on the road.
This would be annoying enough for people to find it necessary to visit a garage quickly to buy new tyres. The noise might even be made to increase and decrease in frequency, in a siren-like way as the wheel in question rotates.
Freedom of speech. It’s a great idea; until you are forced to spend one minute listening to some nazi or nerd or sycophant or fundamentalist or egomaniac sounding off. Freedom of speech is fine, as long as people don’t drown each other out and can walk away from the soapbox.
Which leads me to online communications. At the moment, I can search the web with various ‘safety’ filters in place. Often however, when I read some comments string or some newsgroup, people are just so intolerant and rude. There is a tendency to resort immediately to some unnecessarily hyped language. Two posts later, it becomes obviously inappropriate.
Today’s invention is a software based filter which web readers can use to substitute-in less emotive words when they are perusing user-generated content…”idiot” would become “person with limited understanding” etc. (We might resort to the automatic substitution of derogatory terms by friendlier emoticons instead and there would also have to be some slightly intelligent handling, in English, of the use of ‘a’ and ‘an’).
This would lessen the emotional tone of a lot of comms and make it easier to see the strength of people’s arguments, independent of their intensity. I’d be interested in a scheme which blocked postings from individuals whose comments had been very frequently edited in this way. I claim the inalienable freedom to ignore their rantings.
In olden, ie pre-Edison, times we had streets lit by flickering gas lamps (if we were lucky). Now that electricity is a more usual power source, why do we still have static, uniform levels of light output?
It always seems crazy to me that city streets, already lit by shop windows and signs, are doubly lit by such civic lights.
Today’s invention aims to save a lot of money by enabling such lamps to sense the local ambient light level and adapt the intensity of their output to achieve a constant level of illumination. This would allow many lamps to run at reduced power and provide a more consistent, and therefore safe, visual environment.
I was attending an EU conference receently which benefitted from some pretty fancy comms and multimedia technology. As each speaker addressed the meeting from the floor, their moving image appeared on two giant screens at the front (with sometimes hilarious consequences, because eg the speaker was sitting directly behind someone who was much taller….leading to frequent mismatches between the voice and apparent face of the individual concerned).
Today’s invention is twofold…
a) simply equip each seat in an auditorium with its own webcam, rather than a central, tv-quality system (which needs a fancy system to point it in the right direction).
b) provide the chairman with a touchscreen showing all of the audience. This avoids having to spend a lot of time saying ‘ yes, lady in the red dress…’ etc which is embarrassing and slow.
Whoever is in the chair could select people whose ‘request to talk’ button was lit, by touching their face on the screen at the front and thus automatically switching their mic and webcam on.
