Category: Feasible inventions

Back in the dim and distant days when dotcoms were getting funding, based on some crazy business models, there were various schemes for linking domain names to telephone numbers. It seems that none of these has prospered.

Today’s invention is simply to replicate the concept behind domain names (words are more convenient than digits), to make it easier to call a company. Those organisations who discourage contact by telephone or even email, eg Microsoft Corporation, are generally to be avoided, in my experience.

A web-enabled phone (what other sort is there?) allows the user to key in eg “ibm.com”. The message is relayed, by the phone company server, to the ibm server which then sends the numeric contents of a small file eg ibm.phonecontact back to the phone which automatically dials the number.

Even so, you’ll still probably end up talking to a machine or someone with no stake in the company…

Motor vehicles seem to get along fine, running on a small number of tyred wheels. Fine as long as you don’t consider eg

• the effort (and cost) involved in scrubbing big fat tryes across tarmac
• the problems of driving on ice and snow
• the dangers of having a tyre blow out (or having one shot at)
• the effects of limited suspension travel, when traversing rough terrain

Today’s invention is to provide ground vehicles with a computer-controlled, adaptive undercarriage platform containing a larger number of small wheels (say 40) with narrow tyres. A variable subset of these wheels would be electrically driven by the engine at any time (dependent upon the cornering dynamics at a particular moment and the sensed quality of local ground surface).

Each of these wheels could be steered and braked independently to provide near-to-optimal cornering, irrespective of the roughness of the terrain. To park the vehicle, lock the wheels against rotation then lift and lower them in waves, walking into the space.

I have to admit that I’m pretty bored by much of professional sport. It’s really difficult to identify in any way with the bronzed international athletes who play primarily for cash, rather than the honour of any particular team or nation.

True supporters, however, always like to believe that they can influence the outcome of eg a game of football by virtue of their fanatical exhortation. Today’s invention attempts to give them some real control over the outcome of their favourite game.

Imagine an international match where microphones are placed around the pitch. If your team has the ball, as a supporter you cheer and scream your heart out. This noise would be captured by the microphones and used to widen both goalmouths using uprights driven along a track by some accurately controlled electric motors. Widening both goals removes the need to identify who is in possession (only one goal can be under attack at a time). Naturally, if your side is dispossessed, the test would be to be as quiet as possible (a valuable education in itself for the average football supporter).

This would allow much greater participation and even more fanaticism by the crowd (who would probably have to be searched, on entry to the ground, for any noise generating equipment -I’m sure FIFA could come up with some rules in less than a decade or so). This scheme might be adapted to allow input from a global, online audience. This could take the form of financial pledges made to charity, rather than cheering volume.

Velcro is commonly employed as a secure closure method for the front flaps, pockets and wrists of eg parkas. It could just as easily be used, however, to form all seams in clothing. This would allow clothes to conform, much more commonly, to the claim ‘one size fits all.’

It would mean that a much smaller range of flat panels of different sizes could be supplied to consumers. They would be able to be assembled into a well-fitting wardrobe of garments by joining the panels together, once they had been wrapped around the owner’s body.

For those people who find themselves challenged by eg assembling flatpack furniture, the velcro strips could be made of patches of hooks and loops of differing sizes, allowing only the correctly corresponding seams to be aligned and joined.

Another benefit is that these flat panels could be much more easily stored and maintained than current, preassembled, 3-D outfits. There is also scope for joining panels of contrasting colours in order to make more personalised, patchwork suits.

Want to get undressed in a hurry? Grab a panel and pull. Stained your favourite jacket? Simply tear out the panel in question and dry clean that one alone. Feeling the cold or need extra abrasion resistance? Just Velcro some extra panels into place.

People who design spreadsheets tend to think in straight lines. This makes life easy when undertaking the programming (which is pretty difficult, evidently), but it creates some additional headaches when the data are displayed.

I recently had to decipher the details of a spreadsheet written by someone else. It was a complicated multipage affair with a huge number of complex formulae on board. Usually, making use of an inbuilt feature, such as ‘trace dependents,’ would be enough to see the underlying structure of the data. When data and formulae lie in the same rows or columns, however, all the arrows lie on top of each other and it becomes impenetrable.

Today’s invention is a two-fold improvement.

1. Replace the straight-line arrows with arcs. The radius of the arc linking two cells could be in proportion to the distance between cells. This would greatly reduce the degree to which arrows overlap and thus allow the relationships to be more apparent.

2. Introduce a step-through function in which cells are visited one by one, starting from some chosen location. At each cell, the precedents and dependents are drawn in (using two different colours and the curves described above). The speed with which this ‘movie’ is displayed would be variable, allowing a ‘dependency flow pattern’ to be perceived.

Charities are now big business, like it or not. One in particular, that is supposed to be caring for children, spends a fortune, I happen to know, on company BMWs for its ‘Executives’.

Even the most prudent, well-managed charities. however, have to think up ways to help support their causes by encouraging donations of cold, hard cash.

Have you seen one of those spherical collection devices that take in a coin which then rolls down a curved internal surface in a very graceful trajectory? -thus encouraging people to donate again, just to experience the dynamics. On a similar vein, today’s invention is a voicebox for collecting boxes.

When coins are inserted, the system would issue a Thank You message, voiced by eg the celebrity patron of the charity in question. The greater the amount given, the more effusive the message would be. There could even be a credit card based system, which would encourage people to type in the amount of their donation, show a short film of ongoing projects and give a personalised message of appreciation (based on the name on the card).

Donors’ names might even be listed scrolling across a screen on the machine.

It’s great that services like Google’s Adsense are available to to place ads on websites without owners having to expend very much effort. It drives me crazy, however, that those sites which have a wide variety of content from day to day (such as this one) tend to have adverts which are anything but appropriate to the visitors who read the material.

The service allows you to choose particular ads or to choose to exclude particular ones, but that’s about the limit of one’s control.

Today’s invention is an alternative to the rather naive, text-based algorithms which may serve appropriate ads if your website is always all about eg wiring looms or some other specialist subject.

Instead, anyone who wanted ads automatically served to their site would simply complete an online form, using tick-boxes to specify the interests of their visitors, rather than any single element of the content. The form might need to have a multilevel tree structure, but it seems perfectly do-able.

That way, IOTD visitors (with a presumed fondness for ideas, invention, creativity and design) wouldn’t be confronted by idiotic invitations to ‘meet military singles’ and opportunities to rent drinks vending machines or holiday in St Andrews.

Have you ever had difficulty squeezing items that are just the wrong shape into a car boot, or thought how nice it would be to eat a picnic lunch without having to have the council dump some benches in every beauty spot?

Today’s invention is a coordinated pair of hinges for a car boot (although a similar, vertical, system might be adapted to domestic doors in order to allow greater flexibility when that damned bookcase (you just managed to get home in the boot) proves difficult to move about the house).

It consists of two sets of hinges. One set is in the conventional position, along the upper edge of the lid. A second, identical set lies along the bottom edge. Each of these hinges contains a sliding axle which can be moved inwards to lock (and allow the hinge action) and outwards to enable the lid to open at top or bottom. They would be electrically linked, so that one set moves out to the open position only after the other set has moved in.

This arrangement has a requirement to distinguish which set of locks/hinges is to be opened (which might best be achieved by two conventional locks and a single mechanical key). It allows the boot lid to be opened at the top as usual or to be opened at the bottom to allow the boot to be loaded from above. In that case, the outfolded lid could alternatively act as an L-section picnic seat). The lid might even be removed entirely to accommodate the latest addition to your collection of slightly oversized stuff.

It’s important that children don’t pick up on the wrong messages in connection with healthy eating and bodyshape. Given that dolls and ‘action figures’ are all designed to be respectively stick-thin or absurdly musclebound, maybe we need a small addition to the market for such toys.

Today’s invention is a range of dolls, of both sexes, designed to resemble more faithfully the variations in real people. These would have body parts constructed, lego-like, from multiple ‘slices’ (eg ten or so oval sections, might be snapped together to form a fairly smoothly-tapering limb or torso section). There would be a very large number of such slices in each doll kit, with diameters varying over a wide range (to accommodate everything from an obese waistline to an anorexic ankle, using the same basic oval shape).

There would also be a collection of articulated joints which would then connect the chosen body sections together.

Using these kits, children could assemble figures with a wide variation in body geometry and perhaps learn to make their own choices about which are attractive shapes.