When a back-seat passenger gets out of a car, they usually find it impossible to make use of any rear view mirrors -or they may just forget to.
The door can easily be jabbed out into the traffic stream with obvious dangerous consequences.
Today’s invention is therefore a mirror fitted to the inside of the rear door of a car. As the door catch is released, this mirror pops up, drawing attention to itself and anything approaching from behind the vehicle.
“So, just type in ‘ colondoublebackslashwww.domain.nnn ‘ after the prompt; obviously without including the quotes and stuff”
This is the kind of instruction which tech support geeks give to newbie customers, and which usually results in great frustration at both ends of the phone line.
Today’s invention is a browser plug-in which shows an animated finger moving slowly across a keyboard illustrating exactly the correct sequence of keystrokes and without any possible alternative interpretations.
This would require that an image of a finger was stored hovering over each key and that a realtime image interpolation be constructed of the movement between eg A and B.
(It just occurred to me that a keyboard which could be remotely controlled in player piano mode, the keys being depressed in sequence by internal magnets, as if by some ghostly hand, might also help avoid misunderstandings when illustrating keyboard techniques).
Today’s invention is a device which can be used in any oven to minimise the amount of time for which the oven door is open. Every such opening wastes huge amounts of energy and makes the kitchen more like a sauna.
The device is in the form of an insulated hinge device which grips the bars of one of the horizontal dividers. The other end of the device clips onto a baking tray. A small radio-controlled motor opens and closes the hinge (reflecting user-selected amplitudes and frequencies).
This has the effect of repositioning the food items in the tray in order to achieve uniform cooking, without the potential for burning one’s wrists.
A more advanced system could be equipped with a temperature probe capable of oscillating the food in response to the readings taken.
These days, young people aren’t allowed to do cross country running beside my local river “because they might fall in”. I’m even told that certain education authorities are considering banning many aspects of school rugby because they are too dangerous to be effectively insured.
I spent 9 years of my life playing rugby and I recognise that there are some real dangers here…especially when big and small players collide.
Today’s invention is a two-way scrummage tunnel which allows two junior packs to push each other but without the danger that either front row will crash into the ground and damage their necks or spines.
Made of tough foam, it would accommodate the heads of players comfortably and allow them to push with their shoulders whilst supported from below.
The tunnel would have many slots parallel to the push direction to enable players to see inside the tunnel and contend for the ball.
When a scrum was over, the tunnel could be rolled to one side of the pitch.
Conventional bullets are designed to be weighty, so that they can be aimed successfully over long distances without deflection (and also so that they will inflict great damage on impact).
Today’s invention is non-lethal, long distance round…a bullet which is heavy enough to accurately carry far but on reaching its target, its mass has decreased so that it delivers only a warning sting.
Bullets would be stored in an insulated magazine and made of dry ice. Solid carbon dioxide sublimes to vapour at a fixed rate (which is increased by friction with the air) so that the impact will decrease sharply with increasing range -and in a predictable way.
It seems that crowds behave in ways that can sometimes be predicted by physics.
Today’s invention is an overhead panel for walkways which consists of a diffusing screen behind which an array of green and red leds is located.
Each led unit is connected to a motion sensor which can detect coarsely the direction of movement of someone walking (or running) beneath.
In order to smooth the passage of a crowd moving both ways in the walkway, each person looks at the colour over their own head and then walks towards a patch of that colour on the ceiling.
This tends to coalesce individuals into a small number of streams (eg 2) which pass each other with less interruption.
Today’s invention is a transparent plastic umbrella with double-thickness panels. Each of these acts as an envelope into which can be slotted, from the perimeter with the eye-snagging pointy bits, a flexible, triangular insert; visible both from inside and outside.
These inserts can be pre-coloured, to allow the user to coordinate their outfit with their brolly, branded exclusively or contain hand-drawn images to provide an extra dimension of rainy-day personality.
Digging trenches for underground piping is so Victorian (not that I’ve got anything against Victorian construction: most of it is still standing).
These days, if you want to lay down pipes without closing the roads and building a trench network, directional boring techniques can be used, but it’s all pretty elaborate, costly and short-range.
Today’s invention is a way to build underground conduits without disrupting the streets above too much.
A hammer (orange) is used to drive a stiff, thin-walled curved pipe underground. The hammer arm length and pipe bend radius can be selected beforehand according to the required distance to be piped.
Segments of pipe are attached together in a sequence (using different bend radii can provide extra directional control).
When the pipe surfaces, it can be driven backwards by the hammer, attached to a reamer of slightly bigger diameter. Finally, a conduit (perhaps containing fibre cables) can be driven through the arc-shaped tunnel and cemented in place.
Today’s invention is an anti burglary device which consists of an insert to one’s chimney.
An electrically activated, slow release smoke cannister is inserted high inside the chimney breast.
On leaving home, this is operated by setting the domestic alarm so that potential thieves are deterred by the sight of an apparently active fireplace.
Today’s invention is a printer which prints in a rhythmic way, so as to emulate the musical sound of drums in a band.
Users could choose the style of drumming, from pipeband to samba, even specifying this in the page setup instructions.
This would inevitably slow printing down a little but it would turn an unpleasant background drone into an engaging, user-defined ‘tune’.
