#654: Centri-petals

Getting out of a helicopter in an emergency is always going to be even more difficult because of those overhead rotor blades.

Today’s invention is an ejector seat for rotary wing aircraft. The sequence of its operation would be:
1. jettison the tail rotor
2. when the fuselage begins to spin, release the aircrew seat restraints and allow them to be flung radially out of the front of the aircraft
3. having cleared the main rotor radius, each seat would deploy a small gyrocopter rotor (parachutes are nearly useless at low altitude)
4. on sensing the proximity of the earth, seat-mounted retro rockets would fire
5. on impact, the underside of the seat would act as an additional crush zone (as in the nose-cones of F1 cars, which allow survival of head-on crashes at close to the terminal velocity for a seat free-falling through air).

#653: Trainstile

I travel quite a lot on trains. These are haunted by ‘guards’ who seem to make a fetish of checking the doors are open or closed, waking up sleeping passengers and bellowing the names of stations after the PA system has just done this. Their main function is to check that people have paid to travel, in a rail network where fitting ticket barriers at all the minor stations would be prohibitively expensive.

Today’s invention does away with all this ridiculous manual ticket checking. Each train door would be equipped with pair of unidirectional gates like the ones which are used at football grounds. People could leave the train freely through one side and enter via the other side by inserting their ticket.

Only the trains would thus need barriers fitted and they could therefore be removed from all stations, greatly improving the flow of passengers and their safety in emergencies. This approach would allow an accurate count to be made of the individuals on board a train and thus ensure that dangerous overcrowding was detected and minimised.

#652: Dressense

Today’s invention is for partners and spouses whose partners or spouses are utterly devoid of any dress sense (the kind of people who will happily wear stripes and spots and checks simultaneously in various clashing colours and textures).

All clothing items which go into the wardrobe of an unaesthetic dresser are digitally photographed. His or her better half (or campaign manager) can then create a database online consisting of visually acceptable combinations of colours, styles etc, using these images. Each combination could also be labeled with the types of event at which it could be suitably worn (some items might be ruled out as unacceptable under any circumstances, of course).

A small screen fitted inside the wardrobe would indicate at each door opening, using identification numbers attached to each garment, what the next outfit should be, taking into account the user’s (computer-based) schedule for the day.

#651: Censorscreen

I’m still annoyed by people reading my screen on public transport (See#442). I’m even more upset by people like court officers blythely dealing with the most sensitive and contentious witness statements in full view of anyone passing them on the 17:12 each evening.

Today’s invention is therefore a simple screen censor program. This code (a visual basic macro would probably suffice for Word documents) scans the text in question and greys out any words which do not appear in the dictionary. This would obscure all proper names, making attempts to understand the document by a shoulder surfer effectively impossible.

Our hard-pressed legal fraternity (I’m surprised they aren’t travelling in first class) can thus continue to work on their papers without fear that they may compromise the integrity of the court process -or justice which is somehow, albeit distantly, related.

#650: No-tie list

I’ll be a big fan of LinkedIn, whenever I work out how best to make some use of it. One thing that this networking tool currently lacks is the ability effectively to screen out the bad guys. Everybody has a personal list of individuals (thieves, tax inspectors, ex-wives, adulterers, cocaine addicted former bosses…) with whom they would prefer to avoid any kind of contact in future.

Today’s invention is therefore an upgrade to online networking tools which allows specification of these names. When a request is made by anyone to link to you, your list is scanned to see if their existing links include any of your blacklisted miscreants. If it does, then the individual causing the problem is highlighted.

In this way, people can weigh their preferences among connections (without the threat of libel litigation). Maybe this will cause civilised behaviour to start to be selected for?

#649: Fanmap

Folding maps is a skill which I never mastered (like clingfilm)…I can certainly introduce folds, in the sense of cramming the whole thing randomly back in an envelope, but the maps tend not to survive very long and there’s always a nagging doubt that that phantom canal I’m searching for is purely an artifact of the last failed attempt to put the damn thing away in a hurry.

So, today’s invention is to print each map on a large fan. One flick of the wrist and the whole terrain is instantly viewable. Another flick and that downpour need not be a threat to the paper representation.

#648: Rollbot

Today’s invention is an educational toy: an alternative to the turtles sometimes used in schools.

A wireless mouse contains a couple of small motors. A child can use the mouse to draw a simple shape on the screen in the usual way.

The mouse is then driven, by a bluetooth signal, so as to follow, on e.g. a real desktop, the path described on screen. Although intended to provide language-free programming, this could be extended to allow the control of several such mice via simple programs written in some graphical language (like Starlogo or Squeak).

#647: Carpetbot

Today’s invention is a way to carpet an irregularly-shaped room, without having to get fitters involved in the work.

A small, Roomba-like robot traverses the floor, recording its position accurately. Eventually, it develops an internal map of the room and can order up carpet tiles which will fit exactly …no cutting required. This device would map tiles to floor so as to ensure that there were no ridiculous 1cm-wide tiles required at the edges, for example.

These tiles need no longer be all of the same size and shape, they could be made to scale in size from some central point like the seeds in a sunflower or the segments of a nautilus shell.

Recarpeting is then just a matter of dialling up new tiles to fit the known geometry.

#646: SpeedSpud

Very few generals or police chiefs would be prepared to act as a test target for called non-lethal weapons. People regularly get killed by rubber bullets.

Today’s invention is a way to make such weapons, if they must be used, actually incapable of causing death.

This involves adapting a conventional ‘riot gun’ in order to propel its projectile using compressed air. It would probably need to be fed from a cylinder on a small trolley (thus limiting the ability of forces to pursue individuals in a crowd at pace).

The weapon would be equipped with a range finder (probably a stereo vision device, rather than acoustic, given the background noise in the average street-level contretemps). Once having determined the range of an individual, the pressure delivered to the chamber, behind the baton round, would be increased or decreased in order to ensure that the impact speed would be constant -and always less than a dangerous velocity.

I’d be keen to see the use of rotten potatoes, whose aerodynamics is pretty straightforward to predict and whose lethality is inherently limited.

#645: Racerbracer

I used to live in Newmarket and watch the early morning strings of thoroughbreds walking back to the stables after training sessions on the Heath. These journeys took place amidst normal car traffic and on occasion, a horse and vehicle would collide -causing potentially terminal damage to both. The car might have been worth £20k, the horse might easily have been valued at over £5M.

Riders have been able to buy themselves airbag jackets for some time. Today’s invention is an airbag blanket which is worn by a valuable horse when moving anywhere near vehicles. This would be activated by any collision so that, even if the horse were knocked over, its impact with eg the road surface would be effectively cushioned.

The blanket would of course carry inbuilt electric lights and reflectors (and proximity detectors might be even more useful for pre-emptive deployment of the bag(s) in order to save those spindly legs).