Category: Whimsical inventions

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’?

Where would the poor old Patent Office be without the umbrella?

I’ve been thinking about how best to upgrade the humble brolly. Here are some suggestions.

Replace all that folding framework over one’s head with a set of equispaced, flexible petals attached to the top of the shaft. The petals rotate like a propeller, fast enough to stop raindrops getting through to you. Flexible petals don’t poke people’s eyes out and merely brush by obstacles (like those little desk fans).

The whole shebang can be driven by a cordless drill motor (aerofoil-section petals might then help support the weight).

If you want to get really funky (my recommendation), then drive it using a toothed belt attached to one’s foot. The belt would engage with a ratchet on a flywheel in the handle of the brolly only as your foot moves downwards; slipping over the ratchet freely as your foot rises again.

All this gyroscopic rotation would help stabilise the unbrella against gusts of wind but might make cornering complicated.

If you must, the petals can be decorated with slogans which are only visible when spinning.

When the rain stops, the motor can be disconnected and the limp petals easily wrapped around the shaft using an elastic band (Patent number: US 1000299278387467837687282827128918 “Linearly Extensible Continuous Ring-shaped Securing Device or System”).

Benford’s Law states that the digits making up numbers in large datasets occur with frequencies which follow a simple pattern and can therefore be predicted. This only applies if the numbers are unrestricted in terms of the range of their values (which certainly applies to stocks…think Wall Street Crash). Numbers beginning with a 1, for example, will occur about 30% of the time.

Today’s idea is to use this phenomenon to get a small edge in stock trading. Specifically, if you are trying to predict movements in an Index as a whole.

If all the stock prices in a given market are analysed, the frequency of numbers with different first (ie most significant) digits can be graphed (in purple). These columns can be expected to follow Benford’s law (blue). Here we see that values with 1 as first digit can be expected to be just about to decrease in frequency, whilst those with first digit 8 are can be expected expected to become more common.

A simple sum of the positive and negative deviations from the Benford distribution will indicate whether the index is set to rise or fall.

Applying this technique on eg a daily basis, for a long time, seems to me to provide an edge, which might well be significant compared to the various sources of noise in the system. It’s also likely however to result in large short-term losses which may make the scheme unworkable for anyone other than a very rich gambling addict (As Richard Branson says “How do you become a millionaire? Become a Billionaire and start an airline”).

Farmers are always in search of new ways to make some extra cash. If there’s no chance of grabbing a big grant for not farming their fields or of selling up to an airport developer, our ‘Guardians of the Countryside’ are often only too keen to line the roadside with containers bearing rustic messages like www.preownedbmw.co.uk or www.needaholidaynow.com.

As today’s invention, I suggest an alternative.

The countryside is already full of underexploited four-legged billboards: ie cows and sheep. Get some waterproof ink in an inkjet device and spray each member of the herd/flock as they enter the byre/pen with a multicoloured, high resolution advert.

Global warming, we are told, is a) real and b) bad.

As a resident of a cold country, I might quibble about whether being able to drive around without fear of skidding into stationary objects is actually that much of a problem. Leaving that aside, it turns out that (otherwise blameless) cows contribute significantly to the warming process.

Ruminant livestock (including cattle, sheep, goats, and buffalo) produce about 80 million metric tons of methane per year…which is a hell of a lot. Farmers can currently buy a digester system which transforms collected cow dung into bottled methane for use as a fuel. The bad news (aside from having to drive muck about all day) is that each system costs in the region of $200,000 which, even for farmers, is a bit of a stretch. Without getting too technical, most of the methane comes in the form of belch anyway, which is harder to harvest.

Today’s invention is a light, sealed, translucent, arched canopy; big enough to comfortably cover a herd of cattle. This would be equipped with an efficient fan to collect the warm methane near the top. It would form a loose seal on the grass surface, using some form of crude skirt and It might also make sense to have this canopy move slowly and randomly within the field.

This would obviously provide a measure of weather protection too, assuming a limited number of stampedes.

(I’m really interested to see what sort of ads this page gets assigned in light of the above title).

Today’s invention is stupidly simple. I spend quite some time, despite the present digital era, queueing at the library to borrow good old fashioned books made of good old fashioned tree.

It breaks my heart to see the librarians have to scan in the barcodes for all my books and then pick them all up again, one by one, and stamp the return-by date on every book. My invention today is simply to tape the scanner to the date stamp and do both jobs on each book in quick succession.

If you wanted a high tech solution, you could go for a passive display in each book, which the scanner would update automatically. I’d always go for the duct tape solution, myself but come to think of it -why can’t I just download my library books yet?

For people unable to fit double glazing (due eg to building regulations) window boxes could be filled with artificial plants.

These would have a range of stem lengths tuned to absorb the low frequency techno-funk that drives me nuts.

Alternatively, the stalks could be automatically shortened or lengthened and actively wafted about in order to cancel whatever offensive noise young Barry has taken it into his baseball-capped head to create outside my window.

I thought this up after reading an article about how US Govt. intelligence agencies are using ‘new’ tools eg blogging and wiki’s to share data. It made the point that allowing anyone in the organisation to post information works well, but that only the very smartest people must be in control of whittling down what’s posted.

It seems to me that that’s largely what consciousness does. It acts as a kind of arbiter between the multiple calls to action which the mind throws up….and chooses what should be done next (we seem to be able to do only a very small number of things in parallel -ie one. Although some women seem capable of time sharing numerous different thought streams effectively).

This filtering also appears to do more than just that. It looks to me that if you have, say 1000, mental processes competing to be chosen as the next one to be given control, consciousness doesn’t just make a choice….it also reorders the remaining candidates….a kind of page ranking applied to queueing mental programs. Exactly how this gets accomplished isn’t clear at all.

(I’m reminded that a similar thing occurs in attempts to minimise network congestion, whereby when packets are competing to pass through some gateway, those not selected are forced backwards in the queue by some pseudorandom amount).

What I know about operating systems could be written in fat felt tip on the head of a pin, but process scheduling in a computer has always looked pretty primitive, especially by comparison with the complexity of some of the programs themselves. Processes wait in a queue and get intermittent access to resources if they are next and no higher priority process appears. Priority tends to be based on some very simple, static rule for each OS (eg Round Robin, First-in-first-out etc).

Invention of the day therefore is a ‘page ranking’ system for computing processes, using a simple model of conscious supervision. This would almost certainly need to involve a feedback mechanism whereby certain system outputs caused a state of happiness and others fear, disgust etc. This effectively defines eg fear as ‘the degree to which some event makes me select a self-protecting process’. Anger would therefore be ‘the extent to which some event makes me select an agressive response process’. Notice I’m not using quotes here: the machine would be actually feeling these responses. Processes could then be reordered according to the extent to which they had contributed to increasing system happiness in the past. According to this model, certain processes finding themselves repeatedly demoted in the queue (starved) could be regarded as ‘repressed.’

The countryside is littered with shopping trolleys, dragged there by shoppers, vagrants and yobs. The whole process of shopping with these things is a nightmare anyway, for store owners and shoppers alike.

Until someone invents home delivery (!) and all those ugly supermarkets close in favour of underground warehouses, I thought it might be interesting to consider the global proliferation of trolleys problem. Here is an alternative to the coin-in-the-trolley deposit approach (since I can never remember to bring the right coin with me anyway).

Ice. Imagine a trolley which can be as large or small as your purchases require and which, when you have used it, just disappears. So why not just make the entire basket thing of ice? Answer: the cost is way too high…if we just reproduced existing designs, I reckon it would require removal of 4 MJ to cool water enough to generate a solid trolley in the existing design. So my suggestion would be to come up with a trolley ice mould which is sufficiently strong in design to carry the shopping, whilst minimising the material. Surely someone out there with a CAD system and some polymer engineering expertise could cut the required mass of ice by a factor of 10…or 100?

Maybe there’s a way to make a shell-like design which could be sprayed onto a standard former (ie fast) and still be sufficiently light and strong? It would have to run on detachable, ablative skids I guess, but at least the shopping would get home still chilled and you could have separate baskets which exactly fit your own car boot.