Category: Whimsical inventions

The only embarrassing problem, to which I can confess here anyway, is dandruff. Bathing my head frequently in benzenoic shampoo does actually limit the difficulty but it can’t be good for one, longterm.

What to do? None of this matters if you insist on wearing sand coloured clothing of course -in that case, dandruff may the least of your problems.

Today’s invention is a small fan which is located inside the collar of one’s jacket. This drives air into an envelope-shaped manifold on each shoulder which is perforated on the upper surface. The jacket itself would be unlined in the shoulder region, to allow a freer passage of air through the material.

The fan would be activated when the jacket is first put on and run (quietly) until it is removed. The airflow upwards through the material would be just enough to deflect any errant flakes of epidermis away from the shoulders before landing and forming a drift.

Chewing gum is pretty disgusting stuff. When the taste has disappeared, usually after about 30 seconds’ rumination, you can swallow it (yuck), wrap it and bin it, or spit it out (gack).

It seems the last strategy is widely favoured among those who are devotees of the cud. It’s pretty difficult to come up with a way to encourage people to wrap their chewings…if I could do that, I’d invent a way to recycle the damn stuff as road paint (it usually sticks to roads and pavements so hard it costs huge amounts to freeze off).

No, today’s invention is a stopgap. Realising that people will still spit gum out, I suggest supplying them with liquorice-coloured gum. When that hits the deck, it becomes largely invisible, saving councils all those cleaning up bills.

Today’s invention is simply a range of small, pre-formed origami-esque ships which are made of lavatory paper.

These can be dropped into a toilet and used for recreational ‘target practice’ by urinating males of all ages.

Designed to be just buoyant, these might also release some vegetable dye and extra disinfectant when a direct hit was scored and a sinking achieved.

Despite the increasing restrictions placed on where people are allowed to smoke, I still frequently find myself surrounded by toxin-laden exhalations (eg when walking past the entrance of any office building).

Today’s invention is a way to limit the extent to which passive smoking is still inflicted on people.

The guts of several domestic smoke detectors would be extracted and attached to eg a waist belt. These would be capable of detecting even small quantities of smoke and their differential concentration readings used by a belt-borne pda to control a number of small fans, also carried on the belt. The nearer the smoke source, the harder would the fans be driven; resulting in active stench suppression.

It might also convey the message that standing ouside smoking is still not a healthy thing to do.

Ships, like any object moving in fluid, experience drag forces. ‘Skin friction’, the effect of viscosity, is one component, which can become as high as 70% of the total. The implication of this is that a large proportion of the power output from the ship’s propulsion system is wasted in overcoming this form of resistance. Traditional solutions involve painting on sharkskin-like coatings or injecting bubbles into the surrounding water.

Today’s invention attempts to significantly lessen the extent to which water rubbing on a ship’s hull holds it back.

The hulls of vessels (eg supertankers) would be fitted with a number of lightweight external, dish-shaped ‘shields’ (the two outer ellipses in the diagram). These would be mounted, half in the water and half out, on very well lubricated central axles down which air would be blown so that the gap between the hull and the inner side of each shield would remain filled with a film of air.

The normal propulsion of the craft (shown moving rightwards) would cause these shields, with lower halves adhering to the surrounding water, to be rotated as shown.

This would also have the effect of lessening the expense of cleaning off the various forms of fouling caused by marine crustations etc on rigid hulls.

Half the fun of opening a present is the surprise obtained from removing the wrapping (The web is increasingly populated by videos of people unboxing their brand new x20j-cyberdyne, or whatever, so this must be an important phenomenon).

Today’s invention is intended to heighten that surprise: it is decoy wrapping.

Wrap would be bought two sheets at a time. An outer, translucent one, with reduced transparency and an inner one with a choice of decoy markings. These markings might be eg a well-known chocolate box design, to be used for wrapping anything other than chocolates or a famous book jacket to be used for parcelling-up something other than that particular book.

If you fancied a double bluff, of course, that would be an even bigger surprise for the lucky recipient. For those who like to undertake pre-opening investigations by shaking, this might all be extended by the addition of extra weights within the package and even eg some matchboxes filled with curiously rattling contents.

There’s a lot of well-intentioned baloney going around about how wind energy is going to help save the planet. Well, my money is on nuclear but I’m still keen on using any comparatively cheap sources which may be available.

The trouble is, wind turbines are costly -so much so that to build one big enough to be efficient, it may never be able to pay for itself within its service life. So, today’s invention is to harvest wind energy by a simpler means. Trees.

Trees thrash around if the wind gets up. There are even patents (oh dear) for systems of artificial piezoelectric leaves attached to synthetic trees -a bit like those phone masts which visually shout “Look, not a real tree.”

I suggest attaching to the top of each living arbor a thin wire (It might even make sense to stick on a large, leaflike vane to amplify the natural motion). The wire would run down the trunk and be wrapped around a crude ratchet, nailed to it. This would gradually tension a clockspring which would periodically drive a small dynamo.

Wires from all these devices within a forest would converge on eg a local bank of fuel cells or a branch of the main electrical grid.

Ok, so I’m not that impressed by the whole second life business (Linden dollars…oh please).

People can fly there and go shopping a lot and some woman makes two million (real) dollars a week by selling unreal estate. Why have a second life that’s just as crap and shallow as that experienced by residents of regular Retailville?

So, today’s invention is Nth Life, a simulated reality in which second life avatars set up a nested, simulated universe where they can escape from stupidity and do some interesting, creative stuff, without making any money for some VC-backed company with its own in-house legal team.

Today’s invention is a new way to add some extra tension to the process of tossing a die -even if you haven’t got a giant bet riding on the outcome.

Imagine a conventional die placed in a transparent cube filled with a viscous, transparent fluid (let’s say water or clear mineral oil).

Roll the outer cube and wait for it to settle on one face. The interesting motions which a die (or a pair of dice) then undergoes internally can thus be made more visible -increasing the anticipation during the wait for an outcome.

An alternative might be to spin the outer box in one’s hands before slamming it down on the table, thus overcoming the occasional problem of losing the die on the floor.

People tend to find imagining future pain quite a hard thing to do. This, and the sheer technical difficulty, often cause them not to backup their electronic data properly/at all.

Today’s invention is a partial solution to the problem of lost-data-due-to-death-of-disk.

Each computer would run a background process to detect if data are being backed up at a sensible frequency. If not, a loud sound effect -of a crashing hard disk on startup- would be played. This would be accompanied by some 1970s-style text expressing a cryptic message about the demise of the disk and all the data too.

A few minutes of pained silence would then ensue, at the end of which boot-up would proceed as normal but only after issuing the message: “False alarm! This is what may happen soon if you don’t get a backup mechanism in place. -Contact…”.

A similar technique could be applied to encourage installation of eg anti-virus software.