Invention Of The Day – Page 269 – Just another break-step productions sites site

#213: Tabloid poncho

I hate umbrellas. As well as being really hard to deal with in windy weather and threatening eye injuries to everyone in range, they really are a burden to cart about and so, usually, they are in the wrong place when it starts to rain.

Today’s invention is a new way to stay dry.

Don’t just ignore those guys selling Big Issue magazine (because you don’t want to read that politically active stuff and you know they drive home in a Merc each day). When it begins to rain, seek them out. That’s because in future they will sell you a low-cost poncho.

Each of these will be preprepared on days threatening rain by stapling sheets of the newsprint together to make a poncho shape -including hood). Each poncho would get a quick spray of cheap, environmentally friendly, waterproofing agent. They could cut costs even further by using yesterday’s old newspapers -or, better still, use those dreadful free copies of ‘Metro’ that litter stations everywhere.

Naturally, the sheets of newspaper would be joined in such a way that the text could still be read by the wearer when eg sitting, dripping, on a train.

When the weather dries out, you can then ditch the cape in a bin.

#212: Bottlebank silencer

People who live near recycling centres can be driven mad by the noise of glass being flung into the plastic bins with maximal force. There is, I’ll admit, a certain joy in hearing that old pickle jar smash into pieces in a collision with 1000 or so redundant wine bottles.

Some bins have a circular brush surrounding the entry hole, but this seems not to cut the noise emitted significantly (The glass doesn’t actually need to fragment on entry, to reduce the volume of the contents, since the bins get picked up and emptied long before they start getting full anyway).

Today’s invention is a simple silencer for bottle banks, which takes the form of a neoprene hose with diameter equal to that of the bank’s input hole. This hose is slighly longer than the height of the bank itself. As items of glass ware are inserted into the elastic hose, they form a ‘chain’ inside, rather than falling directly onto the glass which has already exited the hose.

Subsequent bottles etc pushed into the hose, force the contents inwards, in a kind of peristalsis, so that ocasionally a glass item will pop out quietly onto the material inside the bank.

#211: Handed earpieces

I’m sick to death of having to squint at the minute ‘R’ and ‘L’ symbols borne by the earpieces on my MP3 player, before plugging them into the relevant orifices.

I can understand that product designers don’t much enjoy the prospect of printing the orientation letters in a very large font. So today’s invention is an alternative.

First, for those people who live in countries where English is not the lingua franca, the symbols carried on the earpieces should simply be iconic versions of the user’s hands, orientated so that it would be obvious which went where.

Second, the hand icons might be considered inelegant if applied to the earpiece stems in the usual way and so I’d suggest printing them on the foam pads. This allows them to be quite sizeable and yet completely hidden when worn.

The solution I’d really like is for the earpieces to be completely symmetrical and for them to actively detect which was placed in which ear before delivering the right stereo sound (It might be achieved by reacting to the pressure distribution generated by contact with each ear, or simply by having the user always insert one earpiece first).

#210: Levy levy

You don’t have to be a believer in global warming to recognise that domestic flooding is on the increase. It may, of course, be something to do with the fact that we are building homes on floodplains in a way that would have been seen as foolhardy a generation ago (ie before we warmed the globe).

Today’s invention is a housemoving service called in when a flood threatens a community. A small fleet of vans drive around and offer to move items of furniture upstairs or to another place of safety until the flood waters recede. The depository might actually take the form of a big barge, or a series of covered pontoons.

This would be funded by insurance companies, in order to reduce the claims made on them. Residents refusing the offer to relocate their belongings would obviously find it much harder to pursue claims for damages later.

A similar pre-emergency service might also be provided in areas threatened by forest fires, mud slides etc.

#209: Multityres

I was looking at the tyres on a serious sportscar the other day and could hardly believe how low-profile they were: probably no more in depth than 30mm from road to rim. The reason for such shallow tyres is probably mostly to achieve high lateral stiffness…if you’re cornering hard, you don’t want the hub to move radially outwards, whilst the rubbery bit stays put on the tarmac. The lower the tyres, the lower the body of the vehicle can be and that is usually good from an aerodynamic resistance point of view. Also, I guess that, being stiffer, shallow tyres give a driver more ‘feedback’ about the condition of the road -not something that is appreciated by drivers of family saloons on rutted rural roads.

I know that tyre research is a multimillion dollar business, but that doesn’t stop me leaping in and making naive suggestions, of course. Today’s invention is therefore a new tyre design, based on the oldest tyre design: that of the bicycle.

Another way to get high stiffness, feedback and low form drag would be to create wheels which were essentially several bicycle wheels side by side on the same axis. These would have the added advantage of greater resistance to puncturing…one or two tyres could burst on each wheel without the vehicle having to galumph to an immediate halt. It would be necessary to have the tyres spaced axially a little apart in order to limit wall-to-wall contact with each other.

I reckon it would also be possible to make use of a lot of technology from competitive cycling to design car wheels that would be significantly lighter than even racing alloys. A combination of carbon fibre spokes and solid wheels could be used, perhaps, and it would be interesting to experiment with a range of different inflation pressures across the tyres of one wheel.

#208: Codecoy

Most lapses in security, even IT security, are I understand due to failures by people rather than their systems. People do stuff like holding open doors for strangers or discussiing things in the lift or writing down passwords because they are impossible to remember -people do things that Sysadmins just don’t.

Today’s invention is a small piece of social engineering designed to help alleviate security problems and thus prevent disruptions to the important tasks undertaken by IT support staff, like memorising train timetables and comparing the contents of their utility belts… ; )

First, inform all corporate staff not to experiment with passwords. If they don’t know one, they probably shouldn’t be getting access to the secure resource anyway. Second, arrange for a small number of carefully crafted, realistic-looking passwords to be distributed about the building (scrawled on the edge of an occasional desk and on a few grubby post-it notes).

If someone should decide to attempt to use one of these to gain access, it would be detected by the LAN to which devices (eg PC’s, locks, etc) were connected and automatically send security staff to the location in question).

#207: Dronecam

There is, we are told, an increase in the number of people ‘allowed’ to work at home. This flexibility is a massive boon for everybody: no commuting, mininmal office costs, motivated staff etc, etc. (The number of Americans whose employer has allowed them to work remotely at least one day a month jumped from 7.6 million in 2004 to 12.4 million in 2006*).

Most organisations, however, still have a ridiculous problem trusting their own people to get on with stuff -without watching daytime tv or digging the garden all day. (These are the same people that they spent weeks interviewing and selecting and training). It wouldn’t really be that hard to simply monitor the deliverables generated by homeworkers; but, given that employers are having trouble in this area, today’s invention is a simple tool to help them get over it.

Employees would each be equipped with a webcam and a laptop. Images from the camera would be fed across the internet to some boss’s office where, until he got bored, he could monitor his staff and ensure that they weren’t having too nice a time.

To further pander to employers’ anal retentiveness, the webcam connection would be secured to ensure that no substitution of video streams could occur (ie no sneaking off and leaving behind a movie of you working hard at home). For really lazy employers, automated image analysis could be used to detect the fraction of the day for which eg a coloured badge worn by the employee was in-shot.

* World at Work, hometownannapolis.com 8/6/07

#206: Spoonlid

Yoghurt pots, they drive me crazy. This is because when I pack my daughter’s lunchbox, the spoon I insert for her to eat her yog, never returns home from school. The half-empty yoghurt pot always makes it back, but the spoon seems routinely to have vapourised.

So, in the spirit of these credit-card cutlery items, today’s invention is to incorporate a spoon in the flat top of all yoghurt pots. Once the foil lid was removed in the usual way (and licked clean on the creamy side), it would be possible to fold the circular top a couple of times along suitably-dotted lines and thus create a simple, disposable, origami-style spoon.

#205: Accentuate the positive

In certain places, having the ‘wrong’ accent can be a major handicap. Try being from Belfast during the 1970s.

Today’s invention is a system designed to remove the possible impediment of a regional accent and force people to listen to what you have to say,

The user of the system would speak into a mouthpiece so that their natural accent was inaudible. An internal microphone would then pass the user’s speech to a program trained previously to covert the individual’s voice to text. This text would then be ‘spoken’ by an inverse program in some different accent. Since certain accents are known to carry different connotations, it might even be useful to switch to using an output vocabulary recorded by eg a woman from Edinburgh if one wanted to sound trustworthy (or a Cantabrigian if one wanted to sound ~~arrogant~~ authoritative).

This avoids all the difficulties associated with translating from one language to another: simply a word for word conversion would be required. As long as the word rate was not too fast, this could be accomplished in something very close to realtime and thus allow someone from Glasgow to communicate with someone from Glastonbury without applying any social prejudices.

It would obviously be more useful for application to phone conversations, although certain religious groups who believe that voices are inappropriately sexual might adopt it to allow them to talk freely, face to face, in a machine monotone.

#204: Pigeon Pi/2

Carrier pigeons used to be used as one pretty effective means of long distance communication. One of the problems is that they are really capable only of flying back to a home roost from which they have been displaced. It’s thought they achieve this feat of navigation mostly by using magnetic crystals within their brains as a form of compass.

Today’s invention is a revival of the carrier pigeon messaging service, but with greater control over the outward direction of travel. This approach is based on reprogramming the navigation crystals, by exposing them to a strong magnetic field at some angle to that of the Earth’s, and then taking the poor creatures to an unfamiliar location. They will then fly off in the direction chosen for them, whilst thinking they are heading home.

One possible use for this idea is to use the birds to supply messages to some country in which other forms of communication are heavily censored or jammed.