Today’s invention is a dog lead with the added benefit that when your animal is off-lead, it carries the whole thing itself.
A small, spring-loaded reel of strong cord is clipped to the ordinary lead.
It is shaped to fit closely to the collar and thus be impossible for the dog to remove or for it to tear off while crashing about the undergrowth.
When you want to reign in your canine, first catch it and then pull the lead out to normal length.
Several members of my family are subject to earworms…fragments of music which they not only hear playing repeatedly inside their heads -but with which they tend to sing along.
Even though the singing is well done, listening to the same line of a gallic ballad 50 times in succession can be somewhat trying.
Today’s invention is a system to reduce the domestic noise pollution.
A microphone attached to a computer detects any snatches of sound which are repeated more than a few times.
When this has happened, a program is triggered which plays a random, fresh piece of music through speakers.
The best substitute is usually a piece which contrasts sharply in style with the last earworm.
A more sophisticated version of this idea would therefore identify the song being sung and choose a new tune which has a very different musical tone and tempo.
A related approach would be used for family members singing along tunelessly whilst listening to music through headphones. An external mic would listen for singing outside the headphones or earbuds and in the event of any unfortunate tendency to karaoke, it would cut off the music for, say, five minutes.
What word do you think of when you scroll down this page?
The ability to detect some feature common to a number of complex, natural scenes is something which only people can do*.
Today’s invention is therefore a captcha-type security tool which distinguishes between people and bots by asking registrants to type in the word which links a collection of such images.
This would be inherently much more difficult than asking eg how many giraffes are in the picture…which is clearly guessable.
It might be possible to simply send people to a page on Pinterest, with any captions removed. Certainly, Google image search doesn’t work in this context because some of the images which appear in response to a general search term ‘arch’ are explicit diagrams or may actually contain the word itself).
(* Although this kind of software could detect ‘arch’ es, it would have no ability to discern that this was what linked all the images on a page).
I’ve been reading about the conflicting evidence which exists about whether bicycle helmets increase road safety. It seems that there is serious doubt about something I’d assumed true.
One major cause of injuries is that, on impact, a rider’s head rapidly rotates, resulting in brain and spinal damage by twisting.
Today’s invention is a bicycle helmet design which consists of a padded inner and a hard outer shell with many, marble-sized perforations. The outer shell is made to have as small a diameter as possible.
Each perforation accommodates a tough plastic sphere, in such a way that it is retained within the hole, but able to spin in any direction.
When a rider comes off and hits his or her head, the spheres absorb some of the energy but also rotate within their recesses so that the head itself is not wrenched around by the impact.
Now that much of the world is running short of fresh water, desalination technology is greatly in demand.
Salt concentration in the ocean varies from about 3.2 to 3.8% so the job can be made 16% easier just by using water from the right spot. This unfortunately turns out to be at a depth of about 500m.
So today’s invention is to use a militarily-redundant nuclear submarine to desalinate water whilst moored at this depth.
Such machines already make their own fresh water but I imagine fitting out the interior with eg large-scale osmotic filters and flash evaporators, in place of the usual weaponry and crew accommodation.
The engines, which have already been heavily invested in, could provide many more years of useful service running the plant and pumping fresh water ashore.
When you watch some unfortunate’s car being lifted onto the back of a lorry, to be ransomed by the traffic aurthorities, it’s a thought-provoking experience.
The thought it has most recently provoked is today’s invention: a mobile multistorey carpark.
Trucks would be parked in urban locations, more or less permanently.
These have a number of vertical masts which can be folded down during transit. Each mast has a set of platforms which lock securely to it. It also has a hoist (like that used by traffic wardens, shown as a thicker horizontal bar).
When a car wants to park, it drives onto an empty platform which is left in the roadway (and which can be easily driven over by passing traffic).
This is quickly hoisted upwards and inwards (automatically, after the occupants have exited and texted the truck’s mobile number with their parking code) so that the platform and car are locked onto a mast.
On return to the truck later, the driver once again texts his code to have his car brought to the road (after a proximity detector tests that no cars are just about to drive past).
Everything about car design fascinates me. This evening, I considered this rather silly car and in doing so, it occurred to me that conventional suspension is just daft for certain applications.
As any vehicle hammers down the road or along a track, so its bodywork bounces about atop a collection of springs. Inevitably, much of this motion is not purely elastic and a lot of energy must be lost to the passing airstream in the form of increased turbulence. It must be a particular problem on rough surfaces where the clearance between tyre and bodywork fluctuates wildly.
Today’s invention is a racecar which has no suspension. The axles are rigidly attached to the chassis (allowing almost zero tyre clearance).
The driver sits in a seat which ‘knows’ exactly where, on any given track, it is. This could be achieved using a combination of GPS and trackside signs detected by an onboard camera.
The seat detects, during a few slow practice laps, where all the uneven surface spots are and compensates exactly by driving the seat up and down rapidly, but smoothly (using an electric motor, some tuneable dampers and a small computer). This could even take into account radial tyre compression due to downforce at speed.
Moving the driver about is much more efficient than lifting a large fraction of the whole car, many times per lap.
Today’s invention is a relatively simple interface design idea that seems to have eluded the world of software.
Everyone in that world is no doubt a flawless typist and password prodigy.
It drives me crazy, however, when eg logging into some program that the OS or browser or whatever launches another dialog box which then becomes the centre of events and soaks up the previous few characters I’ve just painfully generated.
The result is that I have to deal with the new box first by deleting my inappropriate part-entry and then remembering a wholly different password.
Instead, imagine that any new text entry boxes popping up do so without occluding the one you are working on.
If there is a problem, such as having forgotten one’s password for the window being typed in, rather than locking up the entire machine by refusing to move to the next dialogue box, such windows would all have equal status -so that you could type one letter at a time into each, if you fancied the idea.
Googling “bicycle canopy” is a very life-affirming experience for an inventor.
The same can’t be said of the hour I just spent fruitlessly trawling the patent databases in search of prior art in connection with today’s invention.
It was pointed out, by a loyal reader recently, that you can’t ride a bike (successfully) whilst using an umbrella.
Today’s invention is a wrap-around canopy for bikes, like that on a pram, which is designed to allow control of the machine whilst lowering drag and limiting the exposure to the elements of the rider.
A bar is locked onto the seat post and runs at right angles to the direction of travel.
At each end of this are attached numerous canopy segments, some of which may be made of eg thin, solid glass-fibre and others could be made of flexible, waterproof plastic sheet supported by carbon fibre semi-ellipses. The segments might be poppered or zipped together at the edges where they meet.
There would be a transparent section to see through, a gap through which the rider’s legs could extend when stopping and slots for the wheels.
(In a very high crosswind, you might want to fold down the upper 180 degrees).
More motor racing. I’m intrigued by this branch of engineering, partly because it exists solely due its use as a marketing tool.
If it didn’t sell a shedload of soft drinks or financial services, people would find themselves back racing their daily rides across muddy fields.
Today’s invention adds to the marketing circus.
Cars, especially in F1, already carry a number of cameras. They would now have to carry a high-powered projector.
A sensor in each vehicle would detect whether there was a car within one length behind it.
If there was none, the projector would display an image of their main sponsor’s logo -on the track surface (Logos have already been greatly simplified, for a variety of reasons).
As well as increasing the total advertisement real estate, this would give added incentive for tailing cars to try to catch others, to extinguish the projections of rival sponsors.
On wet days, the projection could be switched to forward-facing, out of the spray.
