Velcro: even the name suggests space age invention…they had to spend $50 billion and fly to the moon to get Teflon but Velcro was inspired by the burrs on a common plant.

It may be heretical, but it can still be damned annoying stuff…for example when the cuffs of one’s mountain jacket get caught in the storm flap (which still needs a zip to keep the edges aligned vertically). This is especially irritating when a storm is actually about to break and the required item gets dragged from the corner of a rucksack in which it has been busily turning itself into a knot.

Today’s invention makes this impossible by locating the velcro patches within a slightly raised plastic wall-each of which has a unique shape. This effectively stops a star shaped hooks patch making contact with a square shaped loops patch -and similarly, only a triangle shaped hooks patch can fit inside, and bond to, a triangle shaped loops patch.

This natural alignment opens up the possibility of closing a rainproof coat using only velcro (ie without an underlying zip).

Security forces are always on the look out for what’s going on just behind those bushes or beyond some parked cars.

Today’s invention combines one very old technology with one relatively new one to help in this kind of situation.

It consists of a boomerang, equipped with a cellphone camera and a radio transmitter. This allows a skilled individual to launch the boomerang and have it return to them, almost silently. The device would be made of a resilient foam rubber in order to avoid causing casualties. In flight, images would be sent back to a portable receiver and viewed on the attached screen. With a camera fixed into the body of the aerial device, this would require that the resulting movie be either viewed frame by frame or automatically adjusted to compensate for the rotational position in the air.

This represents an alternative to complex, expensive, noisy UAVs (which themselves require great skill to fly).

I won’t even mention the possible uses of this technology in the hands of the papparazzi.

I have to admit to some rather uncharitable feelings when I can’t park within sight of a supermarket because all the near-the-doors spaces have been filled by wheelchair users and parents with prams.

What happens, I wonder, if you happen to be a young parent in a wheelchair -do you have parking precedence over eg a disabled senior citizen? Today’s invention is a way to express this hierarchy fairly as a two dimensional car parking map: a Venn diagram on tarmac.

I assume that there are, say, five equally important categories of parking privilege: eg senior(S), with children(C), wheelchair(W), VIP(V) and loyal customer(L). People who are in the conjunction SCV will need to be closer to the store than those in SC, for example. Those in CWV will be at the same distance as CVL. Each of these conjunctions within the Venn diagram for five overlapping sets is represented as a disc of a different colour. The red disc represents those people who are members of all five sets (with the store located at the centre of this disc). Each different coloured disc represents a different conjunction of privileges, providing all possible combinations with a disc-shaped parking region at a distance from the store roughly inversely proportional to the number of categories it stands for. The greenish circles represent parking spaces for people who fall into two categories at once, whereas the blue circles stand for people who have only one privilege attribute.

It’s possible to adapt this picture for more or fewer categories, of course, and to adjust the total area for discs of each different hue (eg blue or green) to the local demographics.

Everybody is heartily sick of having way too many useless search results delivered. Maybe the page you are after is in there somewhere, but searching within thousands of search results is about as interesting and effective as random browsing.

Today’s invention is to employ the tags which people have used to label their bookmarks as a way to direct search engines to only the stuff which will be of interest to them as individuals.

That would mean that pages found in response to my searches would be filtered according to which best fit the profile of “design(34), brain(30), intelligence(15), robot(15), invention(14)…”

No more need to track the movements of individuals to achieve search personalisation. Just use the tags they have chosen themselves to reflect their interests.

In this era of the mash-up, lots of quality content finds itself being ‘repurposed’.

Today’s invention is simply to make a book of a feature film semi-automatically: based on the text of subtitles and some carefully chosen stills from the movie. Subtitles, I’ve noticed, now contain verbal descriptions of sound effects and enable people to basically follow what’s going on, even without the moving pictures. Adding in some scene directions from the original (digital) script would also aid readability.

This could be another low cost way to add to the long tail of commercial opportunities for certain films, after their initial sales have begun to decline (it’s also easier to follow the plot in such a book if the story is already reasonably well known).