Category: Possible inventions

Photographs of landscapes don’t really enthuse me much. I’m generally much happier with scenery which contains a few wind turbines…I suspect that’s because, apart from being an elegant, quiet design, they also add some sense of scale (and distance). Even the most beautiful view means little to me without that.

Today’s invention therefore is a way to add this to even the most featureless of photographs.

Mountain walkers frequently carry GPS units which record in great detail the path taken on a digital map (as well as a check on the altitude, as indicated by the map’s contours). A walker could take his photographs (using a camera which similarly recorded position, compass direction and elevation/declination). Later, each of these shots could have the path taken superimposed on it (imagine the translucent digital image, correctly oriented, being looked through -at a CAD-like model of the terrain on which the route appears eg as a red line. Such a line could easily be projected onto the ‘screen’ of the image itself).

This would then allow injection of digital images of eg a person -scaled appropriately for different locations along the route. For added realism, it would even be possible to inject a synthetic shadow each time, knowing the time of day at which the image was taken.

According to a brief online search for background data, everyone in the US generates about 1/2 kilo of rubbish every day that isn’t capable of being recycled. This is the stuff that we will continue to have to put somewhere ‘out of the way’ whilst we develop a healthier attitude towards consumption.

Today’s invention is to tip it in the ocean…but not just over the side of a barge as we currently do. The material which we can’t recycle would be loaded into egg-shaped, reinforced concrete pods. These would be floated out to sea, and then allowed to sink. Each would be equipped with a water turbine and a cable to the surface. The fall would attain a terminal velocity of perhaps 30mph, generating a supply of electricity via the turbines.

At the bottom, the waste would be disgorged and the empty shell pulled slowly back to the surface for refilling. The pod’s shape would exhibit low drag, both on descent and on return to the surface.

Imagine how cool it would be if all light aircraft could develop vertical take off capability.

Today’s invention attempts to supply limited VTO and so greatly reduce the amount of space required for planes to get airborne (I’m not saying anything about landing). Aircraft carrier based planes, of course, use steam-driven launchers and arrestor hooks but I’m talking about achieving very much shorter take-offs. These have the added advantages that the noise footprint can be restricted and all that sickening take-off vibration, as engines and airframes are stressed, can be avoided.

Park your light aircraft facing away from the intakes of say two jet engines (located in a noise dampening enclosure, fixed on the ground). Fire both the jets up briefly, together with the plane’s propellor. The airspeed over the wings can be made high enough to levitate the aircraft whilst the groundspeed is still almost zero (just like on a very windy day). The plane’s engine is sufficiently powerful to sustain flight as it moves upstream to lower speed regions of the jets’ intake flowfield.

Thus a small plane can be launched with almost no runway.

I found myself playing with the honey bottle at the breakfast table the other day (as you do). Inverting this caused an air bubble to form and rise through the body of the viscous liquid.

I then thought that if I were to rotate the honey bottle about a horizontal axis at the right rate, I could maintain the bubble at a fixed vertical position within it -each different bubble/liquid combination would have a characteristic spin rate required to hold the bubble steady.

Today’s invention is to set up such a rotating system, with optically suitable fluids, and then to spin the whole thing also about a vertical axis. The large bubble lens would thus be held steady and could have its curvature finely controlled by the rate of vertical axis rotation.

This would allow light, gathered by mirrors, to be fed into the system and focussed by this continuously focussable lens. It should be possible to compensate (perhaps computationally) for the complicated 3D interactions between the two axial fluid motions.

I have used scissors for all sorts of inappropriate tasks, such as graunching my way through heavy electrical cables or even the woody stems of decorative indoor plants.

This has the effect of blunting, even snapping, scissors and it may also be dangerous as I apply the full force of my substantial two-handed grip to a workpiece never intended to be scissored.

Today’s invention is a pair of scissors which cuts when the ring handles are separated rather than brought together. This requires the user to cut using only the much less mechanically advantageous hand opening muscles.

The result is less frequently abused scissors and a lowered risk of injury due to employing much lower forces. Knowing I won’t be able to force my way through some cutting task will lessen my tendency to use scissors when I actually need a weightier tool.

Bricklaying is a really beautiful craft. In the hands of a master bricky, comparatively coarse materials can assemble into an almost geometrically perfect building. But why? Why are we still messing about with all that mixing mortar and trowelling and hodding etc etc?

Today’s invention is to de-skill building by using more finely manufactured bricks. No need to demand clever, springy materials and attempt to replicate Lego at large scale. These could still be essentially made of fired earth but let’s have them made to fit together very closely…if the Inca can do it, why can’t we? Once the foundations are down (levelled by gravity) the construction can be accelerated -even by self-builders and diy-ers.

Structural strength and assembly accuracy could be achieved, without any mortar, by moulding in male and female location devices in the form of robust interlocking positive and negative pyramids on the top, bottom and end surfaces. The weight alone would hold these in place and no significant air or water transmission would occur because of the minute, angled flow paths between interlocking bricks which this would achieve.

There are lots of programs available which do Bayesian analysis of text and thus claim, bogusly, to have extracted the semantics of the content. These often get successfully applied, however, in the form of automatic spamblockers or email classifiers, amongst other things.

(Say I get lots of emails. Say 200 contain the word ‘girlfriend’. Of those messages containing ‘girlfriend,’ I decide that 190 are spam. Now the chance that an incoming email which contains the word girlfriend is spam = 190/200. I could then use this to throw away 190 out of every 200 messages received containing the ‘g word’ although in practice it’s more useful, with spam, to ditch everything with a value > say 80%. Over time, this estimate will change if I can be bothered to label as spam stuff which slips through this filter. It may be less useful if for example I join an online dating agency…perish the thought.)

Today’s invention is to apply this logic to what some people regard as the uncontrollable growth of the number of messages in their inboxes. All sorts of rules of thumb are available in software packages to filter email, but when a message is opened under this regime, the user can click on a selection of words within it (one click=’this word makes makes the message less unimportant’, two clicks= ‘this word makes the message more unimportant’ or the like). After a period of labelling individual words like this, the email client can extract the various probabilities and automatically order one’s messages in terms of their importance. It might then insist that the most important be dealt with first.

Scarves don’t work. First, they get lost but even if you manage to hang onto yours, it remains a bulky, itchy thing knotted around your neck.

You can use a scarf to proclaim your allegiance to some seat of higher learning, but do you really want a warm neck enough to look like a perpetual undergraduate? My main concern though is that it’s really hard work to seal in the hot air trying to escape from your body through the gaps and folds of any conventional scarf.

Today’s invention is a rectangular, neoprene envelope, with a circular hole in the middle, which fits over the head and then forms a seal with necks of almost any size. Inside the envelope, one edge of which can be velcro’d inside the back of any coat, is a series of air bladders which can be inflated by a small bellows (ideally, worn under one arm). This unit presses uniformly outwards against one’s coat and inwards against one’s neck. No air can escape and you stay correspondingly much warmer.

When the weather heats up, simply deflate the envelope, pull it over the head and stow it across the back of one’s shoulders, attached to the inside of the coat where it can’t go missing.

A similar arrangement might be developed for cuffs as well.

There is a growing school of thought (apparently) that running shoes aren’t as good as they are cracked up to be. I guess we all suspected that paying £150 for a pair of super-lift-aerothon-springheels was a bad idea, in view of the billion dollar advertising and the child labour element.

Beyond all that, it turns out that people tend to run more naturally in bare feet. This assumes that they don’t have to contend with sub-zero temperatures and ankle-deep dog excrement.

Today’s invention attempts to get the best possible combination. Instead of training shoes: stick-on pads.

These would come in the form of a sheet of material with foam-backed adhesive paste behind a peel-off waxed sheet. The ground-facing side would be of natural, abrasion resistant, grippy stuff.

Cut the material into the shape of two footpads, remove the waxed paper and apply these new soles to one’s feet. (For anyone whose feet get cold during running, I’d suggest running faster or wearing socks with soles removed…an aftermarket opportunity perhaps?)

After a run, peel off the used soles and dump in the recycling.