Category: Possible inventions

I’m obsessed by the phenomenon I call visual metaphor: when one object can be seen as being ‘like’ some other to which it is otherwise unrelated. Consider the piece of toast which my three year old daughter suddenly declared to be a cow, below. (I’m also pretty sure that similar things exist in other modalities…aural metaphors are probably what are commonly known as puns).

This seems to be the ability to generalise to a very large extent: something which highly analytical types have trouble with, but at which artistic or imaginative people excel (although they, in turn, generally seem to have problems with minimal generalisation…ie tasks requiring step-by-step, small scale logical deduction).

Why might the ability to generalise to this absurd extent have been evolutionarily valuable? Being able to see that a snake resembles a cigar, resembles a penis, resembles a sportscar, resembles a fountain pen is not obviously that useful.

This ability may however have allowed our distant ancestors to make some kind of guesses about the behaviour of a new phenomenon which appeared (when they had almost no other information) based on very loose similarity between it and something already known about. Rather than standing around looking completely confused when the first steam engine appeared, some Native Americans dubbed it an ‘iron horse’ and reacted accordingly.

This ability nowadays may help invention to occur, in the sense that you can mentally swap properties between two objects recognised as being only very distantly similar eg
A cigar:

• you light one end
• you draw smoke through it
• it comes in a metal cannister

and a fountain pen:

• it splits in two
• it is located in the pocket by a clip
• you make marks with it.

Now, swap some properties:

• you might have a pen with a light at one end?
• maybe you could make marks using an airborne flow of carbon particles, like a photcopier?
• maybe you could supply cigars in a metal cannister that also allowed you to write with it?
• perhaps cigars should come equipped with an attachment to locate them in a shirt pocket?
• they could sport a device which prevents them being lit? etc

Anyway, today’s invention is a test by which the ability of people to spot such analogies can be measured and used as some kind of a creativity index. Simply show them a range of images which may have multiple interpretations and count the number of alternatives with which they come up.

For those of us who live in countries where bearing firearms is considered important, today’s invention is an attempt to limit the damage that gun proliferation causes.

The idea is simply to put less propellant into bullets you can buy legally. When you browse for your favourite .44 magnum cartridges at Death-R-Us, you will be able to buy only bullets which look completely normal, but which have had their gunpowder or cordite propellant ‘cut’ with something more benign, like talcum powder.

This will still allow people to enjoy owning all that phallic symbolism and making a loud bang, but prevent them from drilling unnatural holes in each other. In fact, I’d suggest that the propellant be reduced so as to allow all ammo to deliver non-lethal impacts, even at arm’s length -enough for property owners to defend their houses/wives from assailants, but not enough to allow driveby’s, armed robbery, school sieges or assassination. I’m talking about delivering an amount of energy equivalent to a medium strength hammer blow, so that even determined bad guys will be keen to re-evaluate their whole approach.

Criminals will then be faced with massively increased prices for ammunition which has had to be illegally imported or made by hand (a hazardous procedure). Recreational hunters? They really ought to know better. Shooting at animals will only be a sport when the animals get to shoot back.

Optical mice use imaging and digital processing technology to track movements with a spatial precision of about 1000 dpi.

Today’s invention is a range of new uses for this technology, based on moving some surface across a stationary, inverted mouse -or at least the optical internals thereof.

This might enable a system, consisting of an array of such sensors, to recognise large scale hand gestures or, if embedded in a car headrest and steering wheel, it could record movements of the driver’s head and hands (as mentioned here).

The technology might be employed to record eg the number of times a particular door opened.

As a measure of audience engagement, the technology might be embedded in the seats of an auditorium or a cinema in order to record the frequency and extent to which people shift their seating positions. Imagine the dollar value of knowing exactly which ten minutes to edit out of a movie, based on the movements of its test audience.

With practice, it can even record the number of eyeblinks per second and drive an on-screen cursor by following, albeit crudely, eye movements (don’t try this at home).

I spend a fair amount of time brainstorming, both ‘on-fees’ and in the back of my mind -it’s my default mode of thinking. There is something special, ie emergent, about the combination of brain processes that occurs when people are encouraged to shout out ideas whilst reading and listening to other people’s suggestions.

I’m always looking for ways to help enhance ideas generation. Today’s invention is a combination of tools which already exist. This is aimed at allowing people, who may be geographically remote from each other, to contribute to a brainstorming session. This way you don’t have to rely solely on the five or six people who happen to available in Company X on the afternoon in question: they are almost never the best equipped.

Each person would wear a headset into which they bawl their single-phrase contributions in the usual way and which allows them to hear the inputs of others. These words are converted by speech-to-text software and displayed as a ‘cloud’ on the screens of contributors, deliberately delayed by a second or two.

In addition, word association software could be used to spot links between elements in the existing cloud and distantly related ideas…and to display these as if they were the input of some extra, supersmart participant.

Maybe Second Life can contribute something to oldfashioned reality -other than a place to hide from it? (My personal view is that normal reality is no more real than the model versions in virtual worlds like SL -they are all simplified simulations).

Certain interesting things are, however, uniquely possible in computer-based simulations. One such may be that it’s (technically) possible to swap Avatars and therefore viewpoints.

Today’s invention is to exploit that possibility to help resolve realworld disputes. Such a mindswap mediation service could even form a high-value export for SL back to gritty, high-resolution reality.

If you have a fever, current medical advice is simply to attempt to adjust your temperature by varying the amount of clothing or bedclothes surrounding you and thus achieve as great a level of comfort as possible. For those who are unconscious, or infants that may not be possible.

Today’s invention is an attempt to promote heat transfer from hot regions of the body to cold regions and thus minimise the danger of thermal organ damage.

A close fitting body-shaped sleeping bag lined with a network of copper tapes is envisaged. This alone would be enough to promote a more nearly uniform body temperature, but in addition, I’d suggest the following extra measure: a kind of thermal ‘nervous system’.

In its crudest form, there could be a tape running from each of say 20 recognised thermal centres each to a peripheral part of the body (requiring about 200 tapes in total). Each tape would contain a small switch capable of turning ‘on’, to allow heat flow along its tape, only if the temperature difference between that tape’s ends was sufficient. This would have the effect of allowing a fever to progress to the level required to overcome eg a viral infection but not to the point where fitting sets in.

Today’s invention is a new product for the many sources of highly-priced therapy in connection with addictive behaviours.

Prehab is a tool which reads news feeds for the first appearance of each new name on the celebrity circuit. It allows exclusive rehab clinics to get in touch with these people before they develop an addiction and to provide them with a personalised risk assessment and information about the possible dangers of fame and fortune.

This may not be enough to avert the problem entirely but it does allow each clinic to get their foot in the door as the first choice source of support if addiction rears its head later in an individual’s career. It also provides wannabees with a valuable indicator of having ‘made it’.

Some people just don’t have much ‘mechanical sympathy,’ ie a sense of how hard to push or twist or bend a device to achieve some result. Especially when closing car doors, it’s common practice to use the ‘stand back and slam’ approach. This is bad because:

• It encourages people to make a bloody nuisance of themselves in the early hours: “HOWDY NEIGHBOURS, WE’VE BEEN TO A PARTY”
• The door takes a terrible mechanical beating over the course of its lifetime.
• Most important of all, It’s still too easy to catch some poor child’s fingers in the gap

I’m not advocating an MIB II complex electronic door closure system -which is guaranteed to break (replacement cost £2,299 + VAT, per door, thanks).

Instead, todays’s invention take the form of a hose fitted around the internal periphery of a car door, to form a loop (you could use a hollow version of the common foam door seal).

One end of the loop has compressed air passed in when the door starts shutting (it could be compressed by the previous door closure action). The other end of the hose has a microphone embedded in it. The microphone ‘knows’ the sound of a correctly closing door. Children’s fingers depressing the hose, by being in the gap, and other phenomena, such as hurling the door closed, make a discernibly different noise within the hose and cause the door’s internal rubber stops rapidly to protrude -or not to withdraw. (This whistling hosepipe technique might also underpin the contact monitoring pads of this idea).

If you wanted a greater margin of safety, the hose might have pinholes inserted along its length which would issue compressed air streams. These would interact with objects in the gap but not actually in contact with the hose, changing slightly the noise picked up by the microphone and stopping the door from closing somewhat earlier.

A relative of mine routinely feels a sudden burst of nausea several minutes after taking an omega-3 oil capsule. We believe that it’s the result of the soft wall of the pill suddenly breaking down (in HCL with a pH of around 1) and releasing a burst of harmless, but sickening, oil (we hope it’s harmless and at least the effects disappear within a few minutes).

Today’s invention is to use the time-to-nausea as a non-invasive measure of stomach acidity. It turns out, surprisingly, that this isn’t a predictor of that many diseases, but it may help to highlight when someone is undergoing heightened stress.

If we could only find a way to encourage eg suspected criminals to ingest such pills, there might be a way to use the effect as a back-up to lie detection techniques.

I’m no great fan of rasping my gums with a bit of waxy twine, and yet neither am I that keen on carrying around bits of last night’s steak between my teeth.

Today’s invention is an alternative to conventional flossing techniques. Imagine a squishy gumshield-like pad, moulded to fit each individual’s mouth so that when a person bites down on it, any large gaps between shield and tooth, or between tooth and tooth are sealed.

The pad is supplied, from a pipe at the front of the mouth, with water at high pressure which exits from its top and bottom surfaces (the water supply pressure might pulse rhythmically and have mouthwash added for enhanced cleaning).

This flow can then only exit from the mouth via the small gaps between the teeth (assuming the user has blocked his throat with his tongue). In this way, the gums get massaged and cleaned but they avoid being sawn at randomly in the traditional flossing mode.

It’s still not a pretty sight, but at least it’s fast, reasonably effective and probably cheaper than using ‘medicated’ pull-through..