Category: Possible inventions

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..

Some people regard windfarms as unsightly. Compared to pylons and cellphone masts in the form of comedy trees, I’m not convinced.

Today’s invention, however, is a two-fold camouflage technique to help render wind turbines less visible.

1) The turbine masts should be painted in a reflective paint and surrounded by ground-level mirrors which reflect the colour of the surroundings onto each mast.

2) Each of the turbine rotors should be similarly illuminated but with mirrors which are shuttered at the rotation frequency. This stroboscopic illumination would not only cast background colour onto the ‘offending’ machinery, but it would also make them appear relatively still: -removing the attention-grabbing flickering component of their motion.

I’m often annoyed at myself for failing to make holes perpendicular to the surface of my workpiece, when using a hand-drill.

The world is full of gadgets which aim to help, all of which seem pretty complex. Here is my alternative (which just sounds complex ; )

Think of a ring of metal which has three struts pin-jointed onto it. Each strut is thus free to move so as to stand at 90 degrees to the plane of the ring or to lie flat within that plane. The three struts, when lying in the plane, form an equilateral triangle. A similar set of joints exists between the other ends of the struts and another ring. This ensures that the two rings stay in parallel planes, even when the struts fold (a bit like two picnic tables joined leg-end to leg-end).

This arrangement would be sprung so as to maximally separate the two rings. All this geometry would be attached to the body of a hand-drill, with the drill bit concentric to the two rings.

When you want to drill a perpendicular hole in a surface (even if it’s spherical) you place the lower ring on the surface and move the bit in close to the drill mark. This compresses the spring, and the whole device, purely axially as you drill into the surface. At all times you can see where the bit is going and if the lower ring is always in contact with the workpiece, you get the right result. This guide avoids the need to have a range of different sized inserts, one for each drill bit diameter.

If you need a longer axial travel than this allows, these units can be concatenated to provide it. Although I’m generally dead against making things in plastic when they really need the rigidity/toughness of metal, it might even be possible to implement this design as a one-piece injection moulding, so that the springiness could be a feature of the moulded joints themselves.

I’m sick of scouring my entire household for the right number of the right size batteries with the correct charging characteristics. I always seem to have one too few of whatever I need…usually I have one too few even to get the damn charger working.

Today’s invention is simply to replace all the D/R20, C/R14, AA/R6, 9V/6F22, AAA/R03 nightmare with a single, standard battery size. My first choice would be to replace all these ridiculous products with variable-size stacks of one type of existing watch battery. Small, standard modules building to provide flexibly-sized systems seems to be a good idea in general. I could then keep a sack of the batteries somewhere and always be sure that I could drop in the right number for whatever device was suddenly in demand.

OK, I know that the standard watch batteries aren’t easily rechargeable and that their sizes may not add up to be an exact fit for existing compartments and that their outputs may not quite match the requirements of all devices and that some legislative body would have to certify their use in case they somehow triggered a nuclear accident -but I’m also quite sure that these aren’t showstoppers, they just need a bit more technical ingenuity in return for an enormous amount of extra flexibility.

Everyone is waiting for the advent of a novel battery technology which will allow their latest gadget to stay awake for longer. At least with the standard-size idea it would be a lot easier to carry several small replacements and slot these in when necessary.

You need a certain determination to buy small items such as screws and nails at your local DIY store these days.

When hunting for some of those crucial widgets, you can find yourself wrist deep in troughs of staples in packets, loose washers, odd nuts and bolts.

Everything ends up in the wrong place as people rummage around, pick up items and, fearing they can never be found again in the detritus, carry them until they find a better fit for what they actually need -at which point, they drop the unwanted items wherever is convenient.

Needless to say, the staff in these places don’t know a brace from a bradawl so they tend not to bother with reorganising the debris that their customers have created. Today’s invention is an attempt to minimise these difficulties by suggesting some refinements to the display environment.

For items in packets, use gravity dispensers: when one packet is pulled from an aperture, the next falls into the bottom position, ready for extraction.

Array these dispensers on a 2-D display unit in order of the size and/or material of the content -so customers can tell know roughly where to start looking.

Provide a lifesize photo of the content and relevant information on the outside of each dispenser (No need to include store catalogue numbers or extraneous detail such as the standards to which components have been tested -it’s confusing and slows the whole thing down. Just watch how many people have to stop to get their glasses on to read the small print.)

Ensure the dispensers have a lockable inlet at the top so that customers can’t re insert the wrong items in a dispenser.

Ensure there are no horizontal surfaces within arm’s reach on which items or packets can be left by people who inspect them and then choose not to buy. This introduces a disincentive for customers to extract product without thinking about it first and may encourage them to buy whatever they have in their hand. A single, large hopper could be provided, suitably signposted, into which any such items could be dropped for later, manual reinsertion into the correct dispensers by staff. People are generally reluctant just to drop stuff on an otherwise tidy floor. Analysis of the content of these hoppers of spurned items could also yield extra insights into customer preferences.

Making biscuits for a living is surprisingly hard work. One of the important isssues is how long will the product stay fresh, whether in a sealed packet on a supermarket shelf or once the packet has been opened.

Here’s a way for manufacturers to quantify the freshness of their product as a function of time, humidity, sugar content or whatever.

It’s well known that the one’s eyeballs vibrate, when crunching food, in ways that the visual system itself can’t compensate for. This effect is made visible when eating a biscuit in front of your computer monitor (generally bad for the keyboard).

The screen image will appear to jump around with an amplitude and frequency largely determined by the crunchiness of the food and the frame rate of the monitor (similar things happen to horn players apparently…Horn players who eat biscuits simultaneously are an endangered species).

Having recently heard about someone who was refused a place at medical school due only to his colour blindness, I began thinking of ways to help those of us with an impoverished ability to distinguish between eg shades of red and green (which affects hue discrimination in 5% of all males).

Rather than use (expensive) coloured contact lenses, simply equip colour blind people with a bright pencil torch, over which is fitted a coloured filter. For red/green deficit, the filter could be red so that when viewing a scene containing both red and green items, the red ones would stand out more brightly. The torch could be incorporated into eg spectacle frames for added discretion and also for driving (who thought that making traffic lights red and green was a good idea?)

These days it is possible, given some clever correction for background lighting, to undertake analysis of a digitised scene and to create an ‘augmented reality’ by applying eg a sparkly texture to regions which a normally sighted person would describe as ‘red’. Even a crude version of this, which was able to detect any red and green patches lying close enough together in a scene, could be used to provide an alert.

It’s tough being a celebrity, I understand. Even C-list ‘personalities’ are pursued for their photograph these days in the economic war to feed people their daily tabloid fix.

For those females in the public eye who’d rather not make several £k per shot for press photographers, here’s a simple device to bring a scowl to any picture editor’s countenance.

Earrings that project a moving pattern of intense, coloured light patches on their wearer’s face. These could be constructed from LEDs and the swirling patterns generated by small, spring-mounted mirrors amplifying the wearer’s natural body motion (or driven by bluetooth signal from a Blackberry in the handbag -or even vibrated by sound from an earpiece). They might activate automatically in response to the whine of a warming flash, a motordrive, an IR autofocus beam -or just the baying of the snappers themselves.

This would make taking a recognisable photo almost impossible, even for the most determined paparazzo with a flash gun set to stun.

There is a lot of effort currently being expended by organisations convinced that they can detect ‘market sentiment‘ by automated analysis of eg blog language.

My approach would be different. One way to detect whether it’s a good day to buy or sell hard is to sniff the traders themselves.

Since we know that various animals are fully capable of reacting reliably to various emotional states within people by the smell they give off, why not take Rover for a walk on the floor of the NYSE? Obviously it’s not quite as simple as that, since some heavy would no doubt throw even a blind person and their guidedog out on the street (not to mention that the visitors’ gallery looks to me as if it’s hermetically sealed from the trading floor itself -probably to stop mischevious entrepreneurs from injecting nitrous oxide).

Inspired by the story of the Newtonian Casino, I’d suggest training an artifical nose, carried covertly in the pocket of a trader. This could be allowed to sniff the odour within the trading room on a large number of occasions and its neural network trained to recognise which days would have been bullish or bearish. This would then allow anticipation of a forthcoming crash or surge in time to buy or sell.

Canny traders, please contact me for more info.

Two birds with one stone time again…

I am always surprised by how much good stuff gets thrown away. Contact lenses are a case in point. They aren’t all that cheap, yet we jetison them daily in the interests of convenience and health.

A wonderful invention in themselves, soft ones also have the property that they flatten out when left to dry. This suggests a possible way to re-purpose the technology.

If a lens is placed in a container whose dryness requires only crude monitoring, a simple light beam shone through the lens can be made to focus on some kind of cheap photodetector. As the local atmosphere dries, the lens flattens and the light will be refracted much less, causing the photodetector to receive fewer photons.

Perhaps (sterilised) lenses could be used in this way to monitor the environment within large numbers of eg individual food packages.