I’ve been reading about the history of encryption (without understanding everything, written as it is by people who assume that everyone shares the same background knowledge). I enjoyed being reminded of the idea of writing a message on a spiral strip of paper wound around a baton of a particular diameter, to form a continuous sheet. Unwinding the strip allows you to pass it, as a coded message, to someone who knows the correct baton diameter to be able to read the writing.

Today’s invention is related to that approach.

It consists of a bundle of fibres, with say half black and half white (‘on’ or ‘off’). At different locations along the length of this cable, the fibres are arranged to form a crude ‘image’ of eg a letter or some other piece of information (<200 fibres would be enough).

Only the intended recipient would know where to section the rope to be able to see the intended letters in the right order. At other locations, there would be merely noise or decoy symbols.

This could be made so that the bundle was of optical fibres, bonded together to preserve the images and interrogatable from outside using eg a lightmeter device spun in a tight helix around the cable circumference.

Message symbols within the rope could occur very spatially frequently (limited by the wavelength of light) making it possible to compress a lot of information into a small space. This would potentially allow it to be understood only by someone with a machine capable of extreme precision in determining where to take the readings along the cable length.

Huge numbers of people around the world commute by train each day. Many of them will have spent the previous evening watching inane late-night tv programmes and therefore be in search of a good sleep en route. This can be disrupted by many external influences. One major one is the entirely pointless ticket collectors that roam around clipping or inspecting people’s tickets (when the barriers at journey’s end seem entirely adequate on their own).

Today’s invention is a transparent plastic case which is attached to the passenger by a light chain. This allows the ticket in question to be left for inspection (and obscure clipping rituals) without its owner having to be woken by yells of ‘tickets please’.

I’d really appreciate one of these with a small microphone and some processing power on board which could listen to the wheel rotations on the track and calculate (even if the train speed varied from day to day) exactly when to sound the alarm in time to avoid me missing my stop.

This would mercifully bring an end to all those earsplitting broadcast announcements of one’s arrival at every single station.

Adverts on vehicles are pretty inflexible. You usually get taxicabs or delivery vans with a giant sticker or even a full paintjob, in return for which the owners get some kind of regular payment.

Today’s invention is a more flexible way to get a mobile advertising message across.

I envisage panels of a vehicle’s bodywork each being equipped with an array of individual cooling contacts. These would locally cool the panel from inside the vehicle, forming a pattern in ice on the outside. This pattern could take the form of a high contrast, pixelated version of a famous logo, set in stark colour contrast to the normal colour of the unfrozen parts of the bodywork.

When a new sponsor was found, the pattern of cooling could be changed, by use of a computer interface in the vehicle, which would also allow selection of any required logos.

Big screens on electronic products are hugely wasteful of detail. Despite how things may seem, we don’t see the world in uniform high resolution at all. Instead, only about 1/3 of a degree is seen by the eye in great detail and the rest is really very blurred indeed (See this for more background).

Try finding the face of a relative in an unfamiliar team photograph…you have to scan serially before detecting the individual concerned.

Today’s invention allows people to exploit this phenomenon to generate the appearance of a large screen using a very small one (such as a cellphone). Just consider one eye for simplicity. The trick is for the system to sense the net direction of movement of the eye and to shift the image displayed in the opposite direction.

Once the eye starts moving, we might have only 0.01 sec before it is looking at the edge of the cellphone window…which suggests that the motion sensing might best be done by detecting electrical signals to the eye muscles (via eg an eyepiece containing tiny inductive coils).

If the eyes are starting to move leftwards relative to the screen, the image would be moved rightwards, so that the area to which attention is being drawn becomes rapidly centred on the small screen at high resolution. In this way, the illusion is created of looking at a much bigger image through a small window -which moves effortlessly to the area in which an observer is interested.

Even if they are careful, the average wearer of spectacles usually ends up parking their glasses, by accident, face down on some hard surface. The high cost of anti-scratch lens coating (which never really seems very effective) can be avoided entirely by use of today’s invention.

A pair of small, translucent plastic knobs are attached to the front of one’s spectacles, using two small self-adhesive pads. These are positioned at the top outer corners of the lenses, on the opposite side from the legs.

If the specs decide to roll forward onto the lenses, the protruberant knobs make it impossible for a flat surface to come into contact with any part of the optics themselves.