Category: Possible inventions

Very few generals or police chiefs would be prepared to act as a test target for called non-lethal weapons. People regularly get killed by rubber bullets.

Today’s invention is a way to make such weapons, if they must be used, actually incapable of causing death.

This involves adapting a conventional ‘riot gun’ in order to propel its projectile using compressed air. It would probably need to be fed from a cylinder on a small trolley (thus limiting the ability of forces to pursue individuals in a crowd at pace).

The weapon would be equipped with a range finder (probably a stereo vision device, rather than acoustic, given the background noise in the average street-level contretemps). Once having determined the range of an individual, the pressure delivered to the chamber, behind the baton round, would be increased or decreased in order to ensure that the impact speed would be constant -and always less than a dangerous velocity.

I’d be keen to see the use of rotten potatoes, whose aerodynamics is pretty straightforward to predict and whose lethality is inherently limited.

According to Mech Eng 1.01, fluid flows more easily in this duct from right to left than from left to right. Careful choice of the geometrical details enables that difference to be maximised, for a given fluid and speed.

Today’s invention makes use of this basic asymmetry by forming a marine drive unit from a matrix of these ‘leaky valves.’ The valves would be wafted fore and aft within a submerged duct, preferentially propelling fluid more to the left than to the right (and thus driving the vehicle slowly rightwards).

Each valve would be driven axially by an independent magnetic field, fluctuating in both frequency and amplitude so that:

a) the vessel’s acoustic signature would be more like white noise and thus harder to identify than the less variable frequency of a rotary drive
b) electrically-driven valve matrices could be located in pods anywhere on the hull of a vessel
c) each matrix could sustain some significant damage without stopping
and
d) marine creatures, such as whales, would be less disturbed by the resulting clamour.

It just occurred to me that fitting these to the surfaces of a future generation of submarines that swim like fish would add to the ‘grip’ they exert on the surrounding fluid and allow speedier movement (think of each cylindrical section of an eel’s body, twisting to the left and right about a vertical axis).

A fingerprint expert need only find around 16 similarities between a print at a crime scene and the one on your finger to be taken seriously in court when recommending your conviction.

Today’s invention makes use of the idea that fingerprints, for all their complexity, seem to differ from each other by only a relatively small number of features. This is true of diagrammatic faces too, so the idea is to map one’s fingerprints to a simple iconic facial representation of each individual. The distances between significant features in a print might then be used to draw a face, using them as dimensions between eg eyes, cheek-to-chin, eyebrow width, etc.

Such faces, although not provably unique to an individual, could be generated automatically from a fingerprint scanner and used as avatars. This would create a characteristic and recognisable representation, whilst also preserving online anonymity.

A system which insisted on working only with dimensions fed to it from a laptop scanner would make it hard for anyone to pose behind an avatar which was not their own.

Just because something is an incredibly clever mechanical design, needn’t preclude an electronic upgrade.

Todays invention is a(nother) Rubik’s cube which is simply more ‘today’ than 1975.

Take a solid cube of black plastic material. Embed on each face 9, colour-switchable leds, in a 3×3, grid pattern. Each led is also equipped with a simple light sensor.

This device operates by always ‘turning’ one end of the cube relative to the rest of it (ie what would have been the nine adjacent small cubes which formed an end face in the old-fashioned mechanical era). Place three fingers over the detectors on one, 3×1 face of this end-9 (not the end face, of course). Place the thumb over one of the squares in the 3x 1 on the opposite face.

This pattern of occlusion of the detectors immediately changes the colours of the lights to simulate the turning of one end of a traditional Rubik’s cube (This system could easily be extended all the way to cubes made of up to 4x4x4 small cubes).

Proceed to solve the puzzle as fast as possible, even in the dark.

I’ve been reading about designing electronics using evolutionary techniques.

Each design can be boiled down to a bit string. You build a large number of circuits, each based on a different string. Choose the ones which best fit your design spec (fitness function) and recombine their parts to create a new set of bitstrings…Eventually, the behavioural features you want, start to appear.

The trouble is that, although this can yield great performance, using small numbers of components, just as with neural networks you often can’t tell how the resulting systems are working. Fine for a disposable mobile phone, not so good in a jet engine control circuit.

Today’s invention is the inclusion in the fitness function for an electronic design, of some measure of its “understandability”…or at least simplicity of operation. Each design would have an associated complexity (eg algorithmic complexity) represented in its bitstring. Minimising this would contribute to the overall fitness of a given design.

Having to buy different running shoes for different conditions underfoot is a significant nuisance.

Today’s invention is a running shoe in the sole of which a bistable metal plate is embedded (blue in the diagram). A small change in pressure within the cavity in the sole causes the geometry to switch from a flat, road-going configuration (left) to a much more grippy trail-running shape, with prominent studs (right). The pressure change might be achieved by use of a small hand-operated bellows or even by winding a wedge in or out.

This approach has the added advantage that, on springing between different sole profiles, any dirt accumulated will tend to be spat off, improving grip generally.

How to get kit into space? Today’s invention offers an alternative approach to conventional rocketry.

The idea is to build a payload module but much smaller than eg a shuttle (filled with a person and/or a little satellite). Rather than use a multi-stage launch vehicle, drive this module towards escape velocity using a sequence of accelerations supplied by a fleet of identical, small UAV rockets.

These UAVs, would have to be capable of reaching escape velocity individually -but that is almost within the capabilities of some homebrew independent rocketeers. These would be launched in sequence from sites in a line beneath the module’s trajectory and thus form a queue in the sky, chasing the payload.

Each rocket could be programmed to follow its predecessor’s exhaust, so that no advanced navigation is needed. Having impacted on the rear face of the module and flared their fuel, the UAVs would parachute back to earth for reuse.

People have come to recognise the dangers of having one’s identity stolen online.

Today’s invention deals with a new threat, that of location theft. I’ve discovered that some of the geographical details which are supplied by Google are surprisingly inaccurate. These are submitted by individual users and often don’t get checked and fixed by locals (who obviously never look at the maps of their home location).

It occurred to me that one way to screw up a competitor’s business might be to supply Google with false information about their physical location. If customers can’t find them, they are toast.

The simplest approach to dealing with this is to reflect any location information about a business or institution submitted to a search engine, or other online resource, to an email address on the company’s website for confirmation.

Anyone who has ever worked on creating any kind of machine vision software knows that even a uniformly-lit surface usually isn’t.

Although eg a page in a book looks beautifully even and white, in fact instruments indicate there is almost always a strong lighting gradient across the printed area. The visual system takes this into account and removes the effect from our conscious perception. I have a theory that this is one of the remaining reasons that people enjoy reading paper books rather than electronic screens. The pages of books are often read deliberately with a curve maintained in the page and I think this is unknowlingly used by readers to provide a subliminal sense of “where I’ve got” to in the text.

Today’s invention is to provide electronic screens with a subtle contrast gradient across the ‘page’ as a reading aid. This might be enhanced by having light sensors in the reader device which could tell where the room lighting was coming from and adjust the gradient(s) accordingly.

Think about a magnet on a pendulum suspended between three or more magnets (with a mixture of the same and opposite polarities). Release the pendulum and it will fly around, being attracted to and repelled from the various fixed magnets. If you choose the arrangement of magnets carefully, the deterministic, but chaotic, motion will rarely be repeated (given the impossibility of starting from exactly the same spot, each time).

Today’s invention is to use this system to plan and drive a funfair ride. A cart containing a small number of people would be driven on a concave, spherical surface in such a way as to simply follow the pendulum’s motion. The relevant (x,y) coordinate of the bob, extracted by rapid image processing from below, would be used to direct the cart.

In this way, ride customers could be sure of always having an unpredictable experience. In fact, for safety reasons, the (X,Y)s could be gathered offline in order to ensure that no dangerous levels of acceleration occur on the actual ride.