#556: Boozebrake

The medics currently define binge drinking as having more than a couple of pints of beer in one session. How quickly they seem to forget their own time as medical students -when by that definition, every evening would have been a veritable ‘bender’.

Overconsumption is a serious problem though and so today’s invention is a way to help limit the damage which people do to themselves via alcohol.

Someone entering a bar would be equipped with a glass for the night. The barstaff would stick a tamper-evident label on the base. Every hour, the colour of the stickers on clean glasses would be changed. In the same way that access to swimming baths is managed, people with a certain colour label could only buy a drink when their glass was empty and their colour was declared active. The frequency of colour changing would be managed to achieve a balance between happy customers and sensible behaviour.

This approach would limit everyone’s rate of drinking to a safer level and also avoid synchronous stampedes to the bar.

#555: Fasterfood

Fast food restaurants aren’t designed to provide a calm, restful environment. Their business model relies on feeding people quickly and then having them leave, making space for more paying customers (despite the implications for their digestion).

This is in direct opposition to the traditional restaurant approach of encouraging patrons to get comfortable, relax and spend a long time eating exotic desserts and drinking successive rounds of highly-priced beverages.

There are limited ways in which a fast food place can encourage people to eat and go -without being openly rude. The music can be high-paced and the portions small -or at least easy to eat.

Today’s invention is intended as a subtle support for such speed dining. It consists of a large patch of white light projected upwards within the eating area. This would be programmed to move across the walls and over the ceiling. The speed of movement would be imperceptibly low, but still much faster than that of the sun across the sky. This would give diners the impression of time passing rapidly, but without their being aware of why.

Faffing over the french fries would thus definitely be curtailed.

#554: Bandlength

The web has no real sense of being a world…somewhere with locations which are traveled between. One clicks and the next site appears as fast as the available bandwidth will allow. This is a little like sleeping on a flight around the world, only then to awake in a completely foreign place, with no intervening awareness of transit.

Today’s invention attempts to inject some sense of ‘going places’ into the inevitable pauses between pages.

A ‘virtual landscape’ would be computed, on the fly by one’s browser, between any two successive pages (A->B). This would consist of a sequence of low-res, motion-blurred images of page A morphing into an ultra low-res pre-loaded version of page B -probably flashing right to left across the screen, giving the effect of looking out of the window of a highspeed train. The longer a page B takes to load, the longer the route would appear.

#553: Unplanner

Joking aside, even the most erratically-inclined people are very bad at behaving in ways that are genuinely random.

When you need your next action to be unpredictable by someone else, the universal tendency to fall into an established pattern of behaviour can be a problem. It’s not so important if you are only playing rock, paper, scissors but it may be critical if you happen to be a potential kidnap or assassination target (and being monitored, for long periods, by well-organised assailants).

Today’s invention is an electronic diary planner which chooses, with equal probability and as close to realtime as possible, which of n possible activities/appointments you will undertake, in what order, using what vehicles and via what route(s).

Obviously, the more senior people are, the later these choices can be made because their hosts will be more willing to accommodate last-minute schedule changes (This however effectively terminates the old practice of having weeks’ notice during which to paint everything anew before the visiting head of state appears in an open coach).

As well as making it almost impossible to mount any kind of planned ambush, this has the added advantage that there will be no paper-based itinerary (to be mislaid on a train) weeks ahead of some supposedly low-profile visit.

#552: Hollowhelix

It can be quite difficult for people with limited hand strength to open a bottle of wine (I’m talking here about the conventional cork-stoppered bottles, rather than wine boxes or twist-off tops, although these can present their own difficulties).

Part of the reason that it’s hard to extract a cork, even when using one of the many levers-braced-against-the-bottleneck type devices, is that you are pulling the cork out against a partial vacuum created behind it.

Today’s invention is a standard helical corkscrew but with the modification that it is formed from a tube, rather than a rod. The end of the tube would be a closed needle-like shape, as usual, but downstream from the sharp end there would be a few small holes made from outside into the tube interior. Once the sharp screw end has penetrated the cork, there is therefore no difference in pressure between bottle interior and the atmosphere, making cork withdrawal much easier (These breathing holes would need to be angled so that bits of cork could not get through them).

Purists will, once again, choke on their Jefferson Lafite at the very idea of passing the corkscrew all the way through a cork -but they will all have wine butlers to do the business for them.

#551: Scantop

I’m on a personal crusade against paper. Especially the kind that ends up in dusty, ill-sorted backroom cabinets full of broken slings containing illegible historical notes of undetermined importance.

Today’s invention is therefore simply to incorporate a scanner into every laptop. Their geometries are pleasingly similar: I imagine making a machine with a modified screen which also contains a scanning head and lights. drop your paper document on the keyboard, face-up, close the laptop lid and press ‘scan’.

Now that reasonable quality scanning is available at ridiculously low cost and in suprisingly lightweight packages, I can foresee that everything which now exists in a paper form will soon find itself directly pdf’d by these devices.

#550: DinnerDicer

There are lots of people who find dealing with cutting up their dinner very hard work. This may be because of difficulties in coordination or a lack of limb or hand strength -or some visual impairment.

Today’s invention is a way to arrange for every meal to be neatly and hygienically presliced, enabling a diner to eat bitesized pieces -using a spoon if necessary.

A microwave oven can be equipped with a small laser cutter ($50 is the cost of a homemade one). This would be set up to scan a plate of food and cut it into small, square pieces, without contaminating the meal or cutting the plate and whilst maintaining the overall shape of the food itself.

Slicing patterns other than square grids could be employed, if a more visually appealing arrangement were required.

#549: Sendelay

We’ve all done it; sent that pointedly truthful email to some authority figure at the end of the week, when silence might have been a better idea. Monday morning comes around and we wonder why our sense of restraint was momentarily relaxed by the thought of a couple of days’ freedom from the idiocies of the daily grind.

Today’s invention is a piece of code which dwells in your email client and which ensures that when you click Send in the last hour of a Friday afternoon, or just before a holiday, nothing actually gets delivered.

On returning to your desk, refreshed and with an added sense of perspective on the slings and arrows of the previous period, the code will issue a query about whether you really want to send the draft it created.

At least then you get the option to nuke your career in cold blood or safely press Delete.

#548: Wingbeats

I hate flying. No, in fact, it’s airlines I have a problem with. I find it difficult to place the lives of my family in the hands of organisations which can’t guarantee that even our bags will get delivered on time and intact -or which choose to fly through rough air to save on fuel.

Today’s invention is a simple heartbeat monitor which airline passengers would be required to wear on their wrist. This would plug into the audio jack in all passenger seats and provide data about when in a flight heartbeats rose rapidly. This would be correlated with the control movements stored in the flight recorder and these, in turn, would provide a measure of the smoothness with which each pilot was doing his/her job.

This would have to take into account the showing of any particularly emotional inflight movies, but such events are deliberately pretty rare in my experience. In addition, anyone about to experience a heart attack or undertake some act of violence would be detectable via their change in pulse, in time for crew members to do something about the situation.

#547: Pressvest

Almost all humans enjoy, even need, an occasional hug.

Today’s invention is a vest which can record a temporal distribution of pressure across its surface, when a wearer is hugged, and then reproduce it later. Such a design might best be built using a form of durable bubble wrap. Each ‘bubble’ could be fitted with a pressure sensor and an independent air feed.

A microcomputer would record the variation in pressure experienced in each cell during the embrace of a particular loved one. This could then be reproduced by raising and lowering the pressure in each bubble to recreate at least the physical sensations of the hugging effect.

The characteristic hugs of several different loved ones could be separately recorded and played back in order to provide appropriate inspiration or reassurance during that tough day at work or during times of emotional turmoil.