Category: Whimsical inventions

Socks are for most adults, a utility purchase: they aren’t on show when worn and therefore don’t self-advertise.

Today’s invention attempts to address the second class citizenship of socks in the world of high fashion.

Children have long been familiar with ‘jelly’ shoes, mostly as beach wear. I propose to create a range of similar, ultra simple clear shoes for adults and to sell, with each pair, six pairs of highly-priced, limited edition, ‘designer’ socks (think Swatch for feet).

With socks now highly visible, these would be a topic for conversation and a further opportunity for self expression (if people will wear Crocs, they will certainly go for this).

The Mars Rovers have been spectacularly successful in their mission. The cost though, for a species like ours that can’t even feed itself, has been high: a billion dollars, give or take.

Today’s invention is a way to help recoup some of the costs. Although Spirit and Discovery move at the pace of a NASA committee on decision day, their capabilities are constantly being enhanced by remote uplink from Earth. At some stage, they may be deemed effectively obsolete, at which point I propose that their speed be upped in order to allow them to draw messages on the red planet’s surface.

This would, for a while, be the prime advertising real estate in the Solar System. With the eyes of the world watching (having the robots fight or crash over a cliff would help here), corporations would be allowed to bid for ‘scratch-time’, ie to have their logos and other marketing messages engraved by the trowels and ploughs of the intrepid robot explorers…

I’m always shocked when walking in the countryside to see how much litter is casually dumped everywhere. I can’t understand why anyone would carry a full bottle of lemonade up a mountain and then not bother to cart the empty down again (although I believe this is true even of professional mountaineers).

I tend to enhance my reputation for eccentricity by walking with a nylon sack and collecting as much of this crap as I can (from discarded crisp packets to entire glue sniffing kits).

Today’s invention would have been a robot capable of doing this work autonomously, but the greatest barrier to that approach is that it’s very hard to get a robot vision system to discrimnate reliably between rubbish and other objects in the countryside -determining items by eg their bright colours, as perceived by people, is a fiendishly hard problem. . Any such system might well cart back only boulders and cowpats.

Dogs, on the other hand are readily trainable to make this distinction (both in terms of colour and scent). Today’s invention is therefore a pannier system capable of standing stably on a rough path whilst a trained litter dog scampers about and gathers anything it has been trained to recognise as rubbish. When the pannier detects that it is full (by eg sensing the weight inside itself) it displays a small light. This alerts the dog to squeeze under the pannier and lift it home on its back.

Personally, I’d also train these dogs to bite anyone found making a mess, but that might be considered too enthusiastic (A dog-operated excrement scoop is already on my drawing board).

I admit it. I’m obsessed by flying machines. Not just aeroplanes, but especially those systems which can lift an individual and take him over the rooftops just like James Bond’s rocket belt in Thunderball. In these days when unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining credibility, I still want to get up there myself (as long as I’m not required to be a passenger).

I’d settle for a regular helicopter, but the price tag and running costs are on the steep side of vertical take-off. So today’s invention is a way to make commuting exciting again.

A high-spec. remote controlled model helicopter can be bought for $1,000. It will lift 5Kg +fuel and fly at 20mph under load for about 20 minutes. For a lot of people, this would be sufficient range to get them to work -if they weighed 5Kg.

So I propose to get together an array of 12 of these machines, attach them to a light aluminium frame using climbing rope and then secure myself to the frame with a hangliding harness.

Not having 24 arms means that all of them would be controlled using a single R/C system, tuned to the same frequency. The frame would prevent (most) collisions and in the event of some malfunction, the multiplicity of lift sources would provide ‘graceful degradation,’ of a sort.

Fuel consumption? Probably not that much worse than a thirsty, 4×4, school-run tank. Noise level? Off the scale. Think of it as a safety feature -no one can claim they didn’t hear you coming.

It’s all too easy to misinterpret the emotional tone of an email you are sending or have just received. Today’s invention is an attempt to alleviate this problem.

Everyone who writes email (ie soon everyone on the planet) could be prompted by their computer, at random times throughout the course of say one month, to answer this question: “How are you feeling, right now?”

If the answer is different from those previously given, a webcam would capture your facial expression (perhaps also asking you to exaggerate your look or to use a face morphing tool for the same purpose).

Your emotional state is correlated with eg your most recent typing and mouse movement behaviour (See eg this research). These data would enable the system to learn something about your mindset on future occasions and automatically inject stored images which mirror it into the current missive.

(Another technique would be to exploit the fact that certain fonts are good at conveying particular moods. Comic Sans, for example is so unwaveringly jolly it drives large numbers of people crazy. I’d suggest that the local font could be set for each sentence, based on the writer’s detected state of mind. It might even be possible to create new fonts specifically tuned to different, as yet unrepresented feelings: ’emotifonts’).

When composing, you can set the frequency with which images are inserted, as thumbnails, into your message (ie every paragraph or after every string of exclamation marks -or when you resort to CAPITALS). As well as performing a spellcheck before sending, it would become necessary to do a moodcheck of the embedded images too.

Naturally, techie types who regard html email as a heinous aberration, will miss out on this, but they tend not to care too much about whom they might offend anyway ; )

Even though I don’t get to drink expensive wine very often, it bugs me that half a bottle left overnight just doesn’t taste as good (no amount of pumps or seals of duck-billed valves makes much difference). No doubt some wine-snob chemists could explain that it’s to do with the air removing certain volatile components in a particular sequence.

So today’s invention will scandalise them: it’s wine in a bag, in a bottle. Boxed wine stays fresh for longer, so why not insert a smaller than average wine bag into each bottle of quality wine before it is filled and ‘laid down’ ? No air contact with the wine, even when the bag collapses years later during dinner (moments before I do).

For those of us who aren’t compelled to quaff a whole bottle once it’s open, this could be a way to enjoy pricier wines…certainly the additional cost of the inserted bag would be negligible.

A seriously sneakier thing to do would be to allow the wine to mature and be transported across the globe in individual bags but then to carefully feed those wine-filled bags into bottles of local origin…thus saving the horrendous cost of transporting all that glass (might require bags shaped like tapeworms, but that’s a marketing issue).

Sacrilege, I hear them yelling? Only a few years ago, people were baulking at the idea of plastic corks; now even they are gaining viticultural credibility.

Wind energy is obviously valuable but limited by the fact that not everywhere with a pressing need to operate the toaster has sufficient wind speed to justify spending $20M on a windfarm (Doubling wind speed creates an eight-fold increase in potential power output).

Windspeed basically increases with altitude, so that jet steams, at about five miles up, can be moving at 300 MPH.

Today’s invention: Imagine piggybacking a redundant airliner (as in the early days of space shuttle testing), stripped of non-essential components, to an altitude of five miles or so.

The airliner could be equipped with a very large set of turbine blades (which would fold out once the machine had been released from the piggyback plane and tethered to the earth using draglines, like a large kite). Inside, there would be a gearbox and an ac generator. These days we are actively planning carbon-nanotube space elevators, so much of this technology is not actually rocket science).

The result would be massively efficient, renewable energy output (via electric cables down a tether cable)…also there would be few complaints about unsightly turbines, or the impact on birdlife. And if the wind speed drops off? Well, you could run the fans and generator backwards for a while on electricity previously harvested to big batteries on the ground.

I just discovered this…hope they aren’t thinking of applying for a patent!

I’ve had to undertake a lot of practical research into the phenomenon of blocked drains, lately…we are talking toilets here actually, I’m afraid. I’ve been astonished by how poorly a sink plunger performed, even when combined with gallons of chemical unblocker. There is no way to form the required seal, so I resorted to a different tactic.

Ideally, I’d use a high-pressure hose, but if the drain isn’t clear within about 10 seconds, the entire house fills with effluent: -nasty. Turbulent vortices, created by a flapping motion under the water surface, are the answer, I’ve discovered. These can be made energetic enough to erode and dislodge the most stubborn of blockages.

Today’s invention is an attempt to achieve the intense flapping required without having to use your hand. Instead, a variant on this trash picker device is suggested, with a flipper in place of the ‘beak’ and the whole thing encased in some kind of ezy-clene rubber sleeve. I still haven’t thought up a way to make this flexible enough to go around a U bend, but fortunately, water is sufficiently incompressible for pressure waves to be transmitted over longish distances -making this usually unnecessary.

When I was in my early 20s, I suddenly discovered that most people didn’t have the same internal models as I had.

Here is a page from a computer-based diary (written in HyperTalk) which I designed to mirror how I think about the year… how I actually see time in my head.

Each week is envisaged as an upwards-slanting ellipse which moves from Monday (lower left) to Friday (upper right).

Successive weeks form a vertical helix with New Year at the top. This helix of the year then loops over and flows downwards towards Summer.

My 3-D view of time does make using a conventional, rectilinear calendar a major challenge, but it occurs to me that it provides a much more direct, ‘zoomable’ model of time than the conventional grid layout (which never works for me, since I can’t stand that need to look over the page to see what’s happening next month -come to think of it, surely it would be better, on computer-based calendars, to scroll time so that eg on the 2nd of the month you get a window displaying the 15th of last month to the 16th of this month…how many meetings get missed because people didn’t see them coming?)

It turns out that I have several of these visual models: the kinds of thing that NLP and ‘timeline therapy’ rely on. Today’s invention is therefore to equip people with a simple, personal design tool which allows them to create computer based interfaces, reflecting their subjective mental models, to the processes of eg

• travelling in the city where they live -see this example
• all the activities within their company
• their relationships to other people (could produce a few surprises).

It would probably be something like a version of FrontPage (that actually worked) but with lots of javascript widgets available as standard to accommodate the necessary interactivity and personalisation. (I’ve just come across this interesting development).

It’s fairly common these says when making a fim to shoot extra scenes, using existing sets, in order to be able to create an instant sequel. This is obviously much less costly than setting up a whole new project but it does require the backers to believe that there is commercial demand for a sequel, even before release of the main product.

Today’s invention is a variant on this theme that occurred to me whilst watching the charming and brilliantly cast Bandits.

Instead of just reusing sets, why not recycle the actors? They are after all, a major cost to any production. My suggestion would be to present the actors the challenge of reshooting each scene with just their characters swapped. Newman plays Sundance and vice versa. (A surprising number of movies apparently had their original cast exchanged in this way before shooting even began).

Creating an alternative version of certain movies, especially those reliant on the dynamic between two major characters, has a certain extra piquancy and could be achieved for a tiny fraction of the price of a remake.

I’d suggest not releasing the alternative version until the first edition has had time to become established. Can you imagine the consumer demand if it were suddenly announced that there was a forthcoming release of ‘More Like it Hot’ or ‘Louise and Thelma’?