Category: Possible inventions

A fraction of radio waves get transmitted around the globe not by bouncing off satellites but by line-of site transmission between a large number of microwave towers.

These are both costly to build and maintain as well as being so ugly they need to be disguised as synthetic trees.

Light travels even faster through the air than through glass fibres and so it would be a good idea, when communicating around the world, somehow to lessen the number of towers…to zero.

Today’s invention is to replace the towers by UAVs carrying small receiver/transmitter dishes.

These have several advantages:

If some need to be switched out of the network eg for maintenance or due to wind damage, the grid they form can be engineered to self-organise in realtime to avoid dropping signal.

The UAVs are much cheaper and less environmentally intrusive than the ridiculous faux firs.

The units could be kept hovering almost perpetually by converting a fraction of the microwave energy they receive into propeller work.

Narrow beam-widths make it harder to intercept the signals and, in any event, the UAVs could constantly move through small amplitudes, randomly, in order to frustrate such attempts.

Although rain fade might be a problem, this could perhaps be lessened by locally increasing the numbers of UAVs when a downpour was predicted.

Many people drive around with their car mirrors adjusted wrongly, despite having motorised control over all of them.

This is partly because many drivers use the same car at different times and don’t appreciate that their mirrors can leave large blindspots, when set for a driver of eg different height.

Today’s invention is a setup to ensure that the mirrors provide a more complete picture of what’s happening behind.

Instead of sitting still, all three of a car’s rear-view mirrors would scan across their fields of view left and right, as well as slightly up and down.

This scanning motion would itself remind drivers to use their mirrors more than usual.

The movement of the each mirror would allow a bigger visual field to be shown to the driver and the period of oscillation would be quick enough to not miss a fast moving vehicle approaching, yet slow enough to allow events in the periphery to register consciously.

A more advanced version of this system would have a small camera embedded in each to detect which the driver was currently looking in and coordinate the movements of all the mirrors so that when he next looked at say the central mirror, it would be showing as much new infornmation as possible.

Imagine a camera which can take shots of code placed on signs or screens at various locations.

The camera processor could undertake text analysis of the image, upgrade itself and run the resulting code.

This would allow one’s camera to take on board the very latest software direct from its environment (eg the television in a store window or browser on screen), including suggestions about the best settings and modes for photography at particular locations and times.

Today’s invention is a modification to the idea of ejector seats.

The cockpit of an aircraft would run down the spine of the fuselage.

When about to eject, this would stand on end as shown, forming a streamlined, blade-like tube containing the separate, pressurised capsules of each crew member.

The tube would be long enough to reach the free stream around a supersonic aircraft, so that ejecting crew members could leave the plane at a much lower speed and suffer far lower acelerations in doing so.

Ever in search of better mousetrap, I’ve been reading about Toxoplasmosis.

This disease is transmissable by about 1% of cats, in the form of parasitic spores, and can be harmful to children and pregnant women, who are not therefore supposed to go anywhere near litter trays.

One curious aspect of this bug is that when it is eaten by rodents they lose their fear of predators, making them much easier to catch.

Today’s invention is therefore a ‘green’, rat- or mousetrap in the form of two-layer litter tray. Placed somewhere with a big feline population, the top layer would allow cats to do their business as usual but have a perforated base through which the spore-laden faeces could fall into the lower tray. Then the upper tray would be closed (using a timer like that in a cat feeder).

The lower tray would be essentially a tunnel in which some bait could be placed.

When the smell of cat had abated somewhat, the lower tray could be opened (using the same clockwork mechanism) and large numbers of rodentine pests would then pass through the tunnel, become infected and thus rendered much more vulnerable to the local cats (and dogs).

According to some headphone and speaker manufacturers, it’s essential to ‘run in’ your new audio equipment by playing a wide range of music through them for perhaps the first few hundred hours.

HiFi buffs tend to be a bit obsessive but this seems crazier than usual. I assume that the aim is to subject the diaphragms to a wide variety of vibrational frequencies, so that the microscopic creases which are formed in their material are not dominated by those of a particular size. A speaker surface with only large creases might be less responsive to very high frequencies.

Playing white noise at high volume might ensure an equal distribution of creases across the size spectrum -but if you only ever listen to string quartets, forming creases characteristic of heavy metal might be counterproductive.

Today’s invention is therefore a running-in CD on which is recorded a cocktail of different musical tones, made by instruments of the type that a listener prefers.

This would allow both a much faster running-in period and a personal-preference tuned system.

(Real music enthusiasts would probably have a distinct set of speakers for every different genre in their collection).