Possible inventions – Page 115 – Invention Of The Day

Archive by category "Possible inventions" (Page 115)

#491: Metapistons

Somebody said that every possible innovation, in connection with the internal combustion engine, had been proposed by the 1920s.

Today’s invention tries, nonetheless, to provide more flexible engine performance without entailing a massive amount of extra complexity.

Each piston would contain its own internal piston. This would move axially within it, sealed by a secondary set of rings. The internal piston could be arranged so that on upstrokes or downstrokes it could engage with and lock on to the outer piston. Only the innermost piston would connect to the conrod.

This would provide the possibility of computer-controlled variation in compression ratio (and fuel consumption) whilst the engine was operating. Extra levels of pistons-within-pistons might be engineered to create a much smoother (more nearly reversible) intake and exhaust flow pattern (by gradual, relative movements of these pistons).

#489: CatTimer

Worried about how to monitor the health of your domestic feline?

Today’s invention consists of a set of electronic scales, wired to a small computer. The scales are set on a chair or stool. On them is placed a cat feeder device (the kind that automatically delivers a cat’s meal at a set time).

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The system is capable of detecting when the cat has arrived on the scales -and whether it leapt on gracefully or dragged its way up there.

It can also tell how long it took the cat to eat its food, after the lid opened (ie was the animal hungry or disinterested?) Over time, the cat can have its weight monitored (which might be used automatically to change the amount of food provided or activate an alarm indicating a health problem to the owner).

#488: BankRail

For those of us who want to travel faster by rail but don’t much fancy the increased taxes required to revamp the entire transport network…here is one possible contribution.

Trains would be equipped with outrider bogies and tracks would have banking sections attached at corners. These sections would have ramp-shaped run-on sections, so that a train, travelling at much greater speed than normal, could have its outer wheels engaged by the banking curves and allow the whole vehicle to make the turn without derailing itself.

#487: ReadingYou

Many people, including me, can’t abide using the phone for communications. I seem to run out of verbal buffer space all too quickly and I have to work very hard to deal with anyone who is asking detailed questions, for example.

Today’s invention is therefore to incorporate a switch-to-text mode within all telephones. This would automatically perform speech to text analysis on an incoming voice signal and display the result on the phone’s screen.

This would allow we aurally-challenged people to keep up (by typing or texting responses). It would also have the additional benefit of keeping a written record of what was said/ agreed (I hate it when people use the phone when they want to go ‘off the record’).

Since most people speak in a pretty incoherent way, being confronted a few moments later by their own babblings might encourage more thinking before speaking in future.

#486: ShowFlow

I give a lot of talks, often using the much maligned PowerPoint software (I’d be happier with OpenOffice Presentation, but it isn’t ready for professional use yet).

Today’s invention is an enhancement to these presentation programs which would allow a small window to appear (only on the presenter’s screen) in which a reduced size version of the next slide would be displayed.

This would allow me to anticipate what was about to be seen by the audience and thus smooth the delivery of my material.

#485: Coastclear

I was incensed to come across a beach recently which was ankle deep in plastic flotsam…literally tonnes of the stuff.

It would be hard to collect this off the coastline effectively without a small army of volunteers, so today’s invention is a robot watercraft capable of helping.

The robot would patrol the water, say 100 m off the coast. Floating items could be detected relatively easily against the otherwise uniform water surface using an onboard camera and collected between two booms forming a floating V shape.

Movement of the robot could be directed using a GPS system and it might be possible to have it learn seasonal patterns of junk density, in order to pursue this stuff before it gets on the beach.

(Ideally, I’d like to build one capable of chasing the people who pitch their crap in the ocean and firing it back at them).

#481: Shape fasteners

Velcro: even the name suggests space age invention…they had to spend $50 billion and fly to the moon to get Teflon but Velcro was inspired by the burrs on a common plant.

It may be heretical, but it can still be damned annoying stuff…for example when the cuffs of one’s mountain jacket get caught in the storm flap (which still needs a zip to keep the edges aligned vertically). This is especially irritating when a storm is actually about to break and the required item gets dragged from the corner of a rucksack in which it has been busily turning itself into a knot.

Today’s invention makes this impossible by locating the velcro patches within a slightly raised plastic wall-each of which has a unique shape. This effectively stops a star shaped hooks patch making contact with a square shaped loops patch -and similarly, only a triangle shaped hooks patch can fit inside, and bond to, a triangle shaped loops patch.

This natural alignment opens up the possibility of closing a rainproof coat using only velcro (ie without an underlying zip).

#480: Boomerangefinder

Security forces are always on the look out for what’s going on just behind those bushes or beyond some parked cars.

Today’s invention combines one very old technology with one relatively new one to help in this kind of situation.

It consists of a boomerang, equipped with a cellphone camera and a radio transmitter. This allows a skilled individual to launch the boomerang and have it return to them, almost silently. The device would be made of a resilient foam rubber in order to avoid causing casualties. In flight, images would be sent back to a portable receiver and viewed on the attached screen. With a camera fixed into the body of the aerial device, this would require that the resulting movie be either viewed frame by frame or automatically adjusted to compensate for the rotational position in the air.

This represents an alternative to complex, expensive, noisy UAVs (which themselves require great skill to fly).

I won’t even mention the possible uses of this technology in the hands of the papparazzi.

#477: Setspaces

I have to admit to some rather uncharitable feelings when I can’t park within sight of a supermarket because all the near-the-doors spaces have been filled by wheelchair users and parents with prams.

What happens, I wonder, if you happen to be a young parent in a wheelchair -do you have parking precedence over eg a disabled senior citizen? Today’s invention is a way to express this hierarchy fairly as a two dimensional car parking map: a Venn diagram on tarmac.

I assume that there are, say, five equally important categories of parking privilege: eg senior(S), with children(C), wheelchair(W), VIP(V) and loyal customer(L). People who are in the conjunction SCV will need to be closer to the store than those in SC, for example. Those in CWV will be at the same distance as CVL. Each of these conjunctions within the Venn diagram for five overlapping sets is represented as a disc of a different colour. The red disc represents those people who are members of all five sets (with the store located at the centre of this disc). Each different coloured disc represents a different conjunction of privileges, providing all possible combinations with a disc-shaped parking region at a distance from the store roughly inversely proportional to the number of categories it stands for. The greenish circles represent parking spaces for people who fall into two categories at once, whereas the blue circles stand for people who have only one privilege attribute.

It’s possible to adapt this picture for more or fewer categories, of course, and to adjust the total area for discs of each different hue (eg blue or green) to the local demographics.

#476: Taggeting

Everybody is heartily sick of having way too many useless search results delivered. Maybe the page you are after is in there somewhere, but searching within thousands of search results is about as interesting and effective as random browsing.

Today’s invention is to employ the tags which people have used to label their bookmarks as a way to direct search engines to only the stuff which will be of interest to them as individuals.

That would mean that pages found in response to my searches would be filtered according to which best fit the profile of “design(34), brain(30), intelligence(15), robot(15), invention(14)…”

No more need to track the movements of individuals to achieve search personalisation. Just use the tags they have chosen themselves to reflect their interests.

Category: Possible inventions