IOTD ebook

Dear Readers,
There is still time to bag your limited-edition copy of the new IOTD ebook which talks about how you might boost your own ideas output and plan to make some money from the process. It’s only £2.95 -download it here.

(Ideal Xmas gift? Em probably not…but it might actually be useful to you, or a friend, in 2013. If you must have hardcopy, I can arrange to get these made up, but the price is silly. If anyone knows a low-cost source of competent, on-demand printing, do please let me know. Thanks, Patrick pra (at) break-step.com).

#2184: Edge-gregious

I spent a little time today thinking about car design and what in particular makes this one seem so ugly (I’m sure an estate version would be even worse).

My theory (probably 1.01 on the course in design that I decided not to enrol in) is that objects have to have sections of their geometry repeated to be seen as graceful or attractive. The Lamborghini Aventador has lots of discontinuities, but they are each repeated (in the same way as features in a face are).

Another example is the new VW beetle, whose windscreen meets its roofline at a sharp angle which appears nowhere else in this curvaceous vehicle.

Today’s invention is a program which analyses the lines in a CAD drawing of a product.

It checks how many times a line segment appears within a design, undertaking this work at a range of different length scales.

If segments are discovered which are unique curves, then these could be replaced by modified versions of other, more frequent, line elements.

#2183: Shredetector

There may be documents that should never be shredded.

I’m thinking here particularly about the antics of the East German Stasi when they tried to destroy evidence of their activities.

Subsequent efforts to restore the paperwork are heroic but fraught with difficulties.

Today’s invention is a simple modification to existing printers intended to make shredding itself less effective.

If we are talking about printing with black ink on a white surface, we could arrange that one of the components of the black (say cyan) would be decreased, perhaps linearly as a function of position across the page. Another colour component could be varied similarly down the page.

These gradients would be so small as to be invisible to the naked eye.

If such a document found itself shredded, it would be possible to use a sensitive colorimeter to arrange the fragments by position before reassembling the original.

#2182: MindMixers

There has been a lot of work done which indicates that researchers are more effective if they have more opportunities to bump each other serendipitously during the course of the day.

The Applied Maths facility at Cambridge has whiteboards in the toilets and today’s invention aims to promote that kind of always-on thinking.

Academic and research institute corridors tend to be a bit soulless and designed to allow ease of movement.

Imagine therefore a series of half-height barriers, each hinged to one wall and supported by castors. These hinges would be lightly sprung so that in an emergency (or when Prof Hawking is on the move) they would easily be pushed past.

Each of these baffles would offer an opportunity for academics, who may ordinarily avoid eye contact, to pause and say ‘after you’ or at least pause long enough to be reminded that the other person is that Latvian postdoc who wrote the thesis on Xian algebraic spaces.

These small, random social contacts are the kinds of events which seem to promote collaboration (and siting coffee and a pencil on a chain on a few of them would add to the effect).

#2181: MaGASine

Magazines for feeding ammunition to automatic weapons are limited in the number of rounds they can hold…mostly due to the Physics of the springs which advance the bullets towards the breech.

Today’s invention is to replace this spring with a piston, as shown in yellow (with apologies to readers who hate guns).

Several magazines could be joined to provide a large reservoir of ammunition, powered by a single piston.

This would be driven, in turn, either by a pre-pressurised pocket of gas inserted in the armoury or by the same recoil mechanism which chambers each new round.

Gas from each discharge would pass into the pocket via the pipe indicated in red.

#2180: ArtWarming

As the proud owner of an old house, thermal insulation increasingly concerns me.

Some of my walls are a single brick thick. Today’s invention is a simple way to cut heat losses.

It consists of picture frames of the box type. Each of these would have a slab of insulation embedded behind the picture.

The frames would be made so that they clipped tightly together and onto the wall, forming an almost continuous interior covering and an undetectable thermal barrier.

#2179: Fadecimals

Today’s invention is intended as an amusing variant on a digital clock.

Instead of having the segments in a 7-seg digit flash on or off, each of these would fade gradually ie in an analogue way.

This would be emphasised by the use of two colours for each segment, say red and green.

“1” would always be wholly red and “2” green, etc.

As 1 changed to 2, the overlapping segments would appear in a varying intensity of yellow (as shown for 1/2, 2/3 ,3/4 and 4/5).

#2178: Uninterruptill

Several supermarkets now resort to the use of self-scanning tills.

This probably saves them a lot in terms of wages but the interfaces are so primitive that they deter people like me from ever going near them.

Today’s invention is aimed at making this experience slightly less harrowing.

Such machines are always located in a bank so that their insanely loud orders are barked out at customers often in quick succession.

This can create an echo effect which makes it hard to know which device just yelled “UNEXPECTED ITEM…” This makes everything even more disorientating -especially for the few remaining shop staff who have to listen all day.

So, why not have these machines wired together so that when one says something, neither of the machines to either side will speak until it has finished (and not duplicate what has just been said, if it happened say less than 0.5 seconds ago)?

#2177: CarouSell

Airlines often make people wait for long periods to retrieve their bags.

This can be a stressful process when you may be thinking about where to eat dinner or book a hotel room in an unfamiliar town. Certainly, much attention is paid to the moving belt.

Today’s invention starts as an exercise in guerrilla marketing.

When the carousel starts to move, place on it a collection of brightly-coloured suitcases, each of which carries some form of message or graphic about appropriate local businesses. These could be added in sequence, so that a longer (possibly humourous) message was communicated to the waiting travellers.

These bags would be empty but would never need to pass through security anyway.

As the practice became established, customers could be paid to carry adverts on their own bags, appropriate to the airport they were visiting.

(These might be eg signs which slipped in behind a transparent plastic sheet, or they could be external tags pinned on so that they always appeared upright -irrespective of a bag’s orientation).

Worried about someone else walking off with your bags? Simply insert a twice life-size image of your face…so that anyone else in possession of your luggage would be challenged on exit.

#2176: FiRetreat

Corridor extinguishers invite people with no firefighting skill to stay near a fire and put themselves at risk by ‘fighting it.’

Today’s invention is a simple one-way trigger mechanism for a portable fire extinguisher (Surprisingly, I can’t find anything like this among the ‘prior art.’)

Instead of the usual squeeze-to-shoot mechanism, imagine a portable extinguishant cylinder with a trigger that, once pulled, allows the water, foam or powder all to escape in a sustained, directed flow.

This device would have the usual nozzle which could be pointed at a fire and simply left in place whilst the activator retreated from the building.