#2877: WClamp

Today’s invention is a way to ensure a public toilet cubicle door stays closed, even when the lock is broken, as is often the case, these days.

Design considerations include pocketability and the need never to handle anything which has touched the cubicle or, heaven forbid, the floor.

I give you…the C clamp. As shown, this is cheap, and would be easily carried by travellers, involve no skin contact with the door (grey) or walls (blue) and be visible to people who will not see any ‘engaged’ sign if the lock is broken.

Also, it would be almost impossible to undo from outside.

#2876: Drag-on-tail

Today’s invention is inspired by the idea of vortex flipping which is beautifully described here.

A fish, moving through water at medium speeds, sheds a vortex from one side of its body and then flips it to the other side of its body, using its tail. This shedding happens from right and left sides in sequence. The effect of this is to significantly lessen the drag force on the fish.

So, imagine say a streamlined vehicle, fitted with a tail device.

This tail can sense the motion of a vortex down its surface (perhaps by using whiskers protruding through the boundary layer) and, just as it is about to be shed, the tail moves to flick it to the opposite side of the vehicle.

This would have a measurable effect on fuel economy, as long as the roadspeed was not so high that the vortices became too small/fast to sense.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that this drag reduction would only be significant at speeds less than about 10 MPH, so this is really only relevant to cyclists and mobility scooters.

#2875: Scatterpillar

Tracks on armoured vehicles are something I can’t stop thinking about.

Today’s invention consists of tracks which run around subsets of roadwheels, rather than all the wheels on one side of a tank.

For example, in the image we have two (green) wheels, linked by a track. The suspension of the vehicle could have several units. At a minimum, each such unit on each side would need to include one drive sprocket, although ideally I’d like to see every unit with its own separate electric motor.

The track around each unit, being much shorter than normal, could be made of something like kevlar reinforced rubber, or chain, rather than requiring to be solid steel.

This would allow each wheel to be made with hollow internals so that extra coiled lengths of track could be stored inside, as shown. (I will come up with a way to have these coils link automatically, in a future post).

This design still spreads the load of a heavy vehicle quite well (especially with interleaved wheels) and massively improves redundancy when under attack, whilst also allowing for faster repairs.

#2874: Misseriles

Military jets can find themselves being targetted by smart missiles that are hard to evade.

Today’s invention is to use the missiles being carried by a target plane to save it from attack.

Missiles and rockets are still commonly carried on pylons under-wing. If a missile approaches, the plane can rotate the pylons and fire its missiles in situ, so as to make the whole target plane sidestep out of the way.

Timing would be critical and the g forces for the crew might be rough, but the same could be said of ejection systems. An upgraded version could have variable firing rate characteristics, to make the attacker’s job even more difficult.

#2873: SoundShutters

I’m sometimes a source of amusement because I like having numerous windows open on my desktop at once. This requires a certain amount of shuffling between overlapping windows, but works better for me than eg switchable desktops.

Today’s invention offers little practical benefit, but adds a certain extra realism to screen displays.

If you have one window which is showing eg a video and which becomes occluded by another window, imagine having the video sound track muted in accordance with the number and placement of other windows on top. This is the audio equivalent of having windows with varied translucency, which seemed popular at one time.

You might choose to have windows with different qualities of sound transmissibility, or arrange a multipart harmony between tracks played in different windows, arranged to form a 3D soundscape. Even the movement of one window over another could have eg a sliding noise sound effect, given the popularity of ASMR.

Some windows might offer an echo effect, dependent on their ‘depth’.

If you actually like having several desktops, it would be possible to have the computer speakers emit sound from some window, off the screen, so as to convey its apparent location.

Audible alerts would thus be somewhat muffled by the ‘depth’ or offscreen position of their window.

#2872: Ccupp

I like having coffee in a double-skinned, stainless steel cup, which keeps the outside cold and the inside hot.

Some people of my acquaintance, however, object to getting their hot drinks in a cup which feels cold.

There is, of course, a whole field of psychology devoted to priming effects, such as the fact that being offered a physically warm cup, tends to create a ‘warmer’ atmosphere in meetings.

So today’s invention is a normal vacuum-insulated cup (white) embedded in a water jacket (orange). Filling the jacket to different heights, and with water at different temperatures, allows the host to provide a longer lasting hot drink in a cup whose temperature can be set almost independently.

#2871: ProgresStrip

Today’s invention is to replace the progress bar on a computer screen with a series of frames from a comic book story.

These stories would be pre-written (or even created in realtime using the dreaded AI). The read-time of the strip would correspond with the estimated duration of the operation-in-waiting.

The preferred approach would help support comic authors, by royalty payments, whilst also entertaining people waiting for their download or installation to occur.

#2870: BearingBlast

I once worked for a deeply dysfunctional company that spent a fortune on Aeron chairs and then installed them in a meeting room with a wooden floor which was still covered in builders’ dust.

The effect was that all chair movement ground to a halt and all those bearings got damaged.

Even in well managed and cleaned offices, wheeled furniture tends to get gummed up. It’s hard to have smoothly running meetings when half the participants are literally bogged down.

Today’s invention is a simple system that connects the shock absorber in the base to a set of small jets (one directed at each wheel bearing).

As you sit down, a fraction of the energy applied by your descent to the chair, that would be wasted as heat in the damper, is used to propel clean air over the casters. This tends to keep dust/ hair/ cannabis shreds away from the moving parts.

#2869: Flush with cash

I’m no proponent of the gambling industry, although I think playing games of chance, in which people are encouraged to assess risks, can be a good thing.

Notwithstanding all of that, today’s invention is a new way for people to lose their money.

Every time people visit the toilet in a casino, when they insert some cash in a wall slot and flush, the toilet handle acts as a one armed bandit, providing them with an additional gambling opportunity.

#2868: BlobClogs

Fun fact: shoes were generally not made right or left ‘handed’ until about the 17th century.

Today’s invention is non-chiral shoes with personalised inserts.

Thus the tough outers would be twice as easy to make. Getting dressed would be less complicated. If you had an asymmetric wear pattern on the sole, alternating outers would counteract this (like swapping tyres) and prolong the life of shoes.

Inserts could be made, like F1 seats, by spraying foam into the gap between (bagged) foot and outer shoe. Throwing these away after several wearings, reduces the effect of stinking footwear.

Also, extreme style 😉