I’m always struck by how chunky the keys on computer keyboards are.
Today’s invention is therefore not a chocolate keyboard but a chocolate bar made in the shape of a keyboard. The normal facets present on the edges of keys facilitate breaking off pieces, just as in the ordinary, less-interesting bars. This could be extended to a box of individual chocolates laid out in a qwerty array and each containing a different filling.
The spacebar is mine by the way.
People have garden parties and outside events in the Summer months. Doing this in a grassy area such as a lawn can be hard work, especially in a climate where showers are common and stillettos tend to sink in.
Today’s invention is a form of temporary decking which consists of numerous planks of recycled high-density plastic foam, hinged together to make a kind of rolled-up spiral tank track. This can be rolled off a vehicle and sections joined at the sides to cover a large area.
In order not to damage the underlying grass, each plank has a set of dispersed feet which hold it a few cm above the ground. For decking that needs to be in place all summer, each plank would be equipped underneath with a number of small, daylight-emitting lamps. These could be made to shine in accordance with the normal diurnal cycle. For extra lawn protection, the planks might carry a sprinkler system -spraying water downwards only when a natural shower was occurring.
Public transport is great but I’d like to link it somehow with a bicycle at either end of the journey. Fold-up bikes are not great…they are costly, complex and have ridiculously small wheels, making their use just too much of a pain on any gradient worth the name.
There have been many bike sharing and free pooling schemes, most of which have seen the said machines disappear into a container, headed ultimately towards rural China. Today’s invention is an alternative approach.
Make many bicycle wheels of a single, sensible size and at very low cost. Leave large numbers of these in public places and then sell people each a suitably-sized generic frame (fitted with a small, removable plastic roller where the back wheel normally goes, a mechanism to turn the forks and bars in-line for easy stowage in a luggage rack and one fixed gear).
This allows people to take their frame to eg a station, drop the wheels in a suitable rack, board a train or bus (with frame) and then slot in two different wheels at the other end of the journey. The rolling frame would be much easier to manoeuvre/carry and the wheels themselves would be so cheap that their ubiquity would act as a big disincentive to thieves.
Every station master and bus company manager would monitor levels of their local wheels and publish the figures on a website. These would then be easily redistributed by throwing a few onto eg a bus or a train occasionally. The process might even get to be self-organising, so that wheels would be more common where demand was higher. If it took off, it would then be possible to do away with some of the normal seats on trains and allow people to secure their bike frames to the floors of carriages to sit on them instead.
Objects, including aircraft, tanks and buildings are located both by image analysis and human observers in aerial photographs. Even though the objects may be surface-camouflaged, unless they are placed under a lot of scrim netting, they will cast characteristic shadows on the ground and thus be identifiable, relatively easily.
Today’s invention is to equip anything which requires to avoid aerial, visual detection, with a string of bright lights. These would be located on the lower circumference of the object, pointing at the ground.
A number of light detectors on the upper surface would constantly sense the direction of the sun and switch on the lights on the opposite, in-shadow side. These could then be fine-tuned to eliminate any shadows cast and thus minimise the optical detectability.
In fact, it might be a good idea to use the lights to disrupt the shadows rather than eliminate them completely.
It’s a pretty shocking thing, when you see the damage an accident can do to a vehicle…especially when it’s your vehicle.
Today’s invention is a new way to make drivers think about their own mortality and take greater care when on the road. It relies on the facts that:
a) when people can visualise something happening, they start to regard it as much more likely.
b) cars exist in a very limited number of designs and colours.
First, many of a nation’s car breakers would be equipped with a webcam. This they use to film the wrecks which are dragged in after road traffic accidents. This material is placed in a single image database.
As a vehicle speeds past a roadside camera, its numberplate is used to identify the colour and model of the car. Pictures of a crashed vehicle matching this description are then sent to a screen farther down the road. The driver will then see ‘his’ car apparently post-accident and, with any luck, it will have a sobering and slowing influence.
As an added flourish, an image of the numberplate in question could be automatically pasted into the crash scene, to force the message home in a personal way.
Many people don’t want to get personal with arithmetic, but I suspect that, for a sizeable minority, there are certain calculations which have a particular significance: the performance of one’s favourite stock, the growth curves of one’s children, the sales of a book you wrote, the original Google businessplan or your marks in some exams at college (however bad they seemed at the time).
Today’s invention is a shirt which can be printed with a checked pattern, just like a spreadsheet, but whose cells contain a calculation or dataset that means something particular to the wearer.
It would be possible to arrange for this printing to be ordered online, by uploading your own speadsheet. This would offer a way to show off one’s data design abilities via a unique item of clothing -and provide math geeks with a conversation starter.
I’m often irritated by drivers of diesel vehicles who seem to think it’s a good idea to leave their engine running for ages when parked.
These things are left idling by taxi and delivery drivers for all sorts of old-wives’-tale reasons (sometimes just to keep their vehicle heaters operating on a cold day). The fact is that they pump out huge amounts of toxins, particulates and noise that I really don’t need.
So, today’s invention is a simple switch which cuts off the fuel supply to a diesel engine left idling for more than a couple of minutes.
Wind turbines look pretty good to me…as long as there aren’t too many of them littering the entire countryside. The most common seem to have a central pole and a three-blade arrangement.
One thing that occurs to me is that these things are made to operate at a fixed height. Today’s invention is to allow the support to be telescopic, thus providing the opportunity to raise the blades to significantly greater heights, where the average wind speed is much higher.
Another factor is that, since the velocity gradient is still quite steep at normal turbine height (it may not flatten out much at less than 1000m), the blade which is at the 12 o’clock position will be much more heavily wind-loaded than those at 4 and 8 o’clock. Another invention is therefore to allow the blades themselves to telescope, so that the 12 o’clock one can be automatically made shorter than the other two, as the rotation progresses.
It’s fairly common, when driving into a village, to have the speed of one’s vehicle detected and for that to result in an electronic sign illuminating with the words ‘Slow Down!”.
Today’s invention is a modifiaction of such a system. Every time someone uses the pedestrian crossing in a village, an image of the user is captured and sent to the display screens on the entrance roads.
Passing motorists then get shown not just a slow down request but a visual indication of the individual people who may be at risk if they don’t.
Expert opinion, I understand, is that people who are being attacked need to do one thing: run. Forget pepper sprays, electronic stun guns and all those judo lessons. The first line of defence is to get moving away, fast.
Today’s invention is a second line of defence, when one’s exit route is blocked and you are too numb to undertake any violent self-defence moves. It consists of a conventional rape alarm, but modified to enable it to be attached, immovably, to the body of the would-be attacker.
When confronted by someone blocking your path, or otherwise within your personal space, whip out the device. This comes equipped with a set of open jaws, like a big bullclip, strong enough to grip someone’s clothes, but not sharp enough to be considered an offensive weapon. Smack this against the arm or chest of an attacker. This activates the usual, startlingly loud alarm, whilst also causing the jaws to snap shut and stay put.
You can now make an easier, high-speed escape whilst the low-life’s attention is distracted both by attempts to disengage from the source of the aural pain and to become less conspicuous.
