Tag: fabby

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).

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).

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.

Racing car design is faced with the problem of how to optimise the balances between eg drag, downforce and heat transfer.

F1 radiators in particular have to achieve enormous through-flow whilst also dealing with all sorts of refuse which finds its way onto the track. Pit crews extract huge amounts of litter, but that can only happen after many laps during which it will have greatly impaired engine efficiency.

The F1 rules on radiator design seem to be pretty non-specific. Today’s invention attempts to exploit that.

Radiator panels would be mounted on rotary seals, allowing them to be rotated during a race.

At locations where engine loading was decreasing, they could be flicked from forward-facing into inline configuration. This would shed a large proportion of the refuse and briefly reduce drag as well.

Waggling the radiators on the starting grid could be used to lower the engine temperature -especially at tropical grand-prix.

It seems that DARPA have identified a requirement to fly high-payload UAV missions from ships too small to accommodate normal takeoffs.

Today’s invention attempts to address that requirement (but without having to fill in their million pages of paperwork).

A cylindrical UAV fuselage has wings attached with variable pitch.

This machine is loaded into a mast (grey) which is then hoisted into a vertical position on the deck somewhere.

A cable around the cylinder is withdrawn, by a deck motor, very fast so that the entire drone spins out of the mast and into the sky. (Sensitive equipment would be located along the cylinder axis to minimise rotational acceleration effects).

At this point, one of the wings rotates about its axis into the same aerofoil configuration as the other and the red tailfins extend from the fuselage.

The internal jet engine fires up, the cylinder aligns itself horizontally, like a plane, and the system then does whatever democracy requires.

On return to the ship, the UAV reverts to helicopter mode and undertakes a remotely controlled descent into the conical mast collector.

Manufacturers are always attempting to engage buyers with their products via social networking.

Today’s invention deals with that issue in the style-conscious world of sneaker design.

Sneakers would come with a box of flat, coloured tubes (like heat shrink material).

These would be slotted onto laces to form a colourful pattern (after being allocated a unique one from the manufacturer’s website).

People with their own pattern could then use their smartphone to image the ‘barcodes’ formed by the laces to get access to the online profiles of other wearers of this design.

This would allow people to make friends, get dates etc. Bad behaviour would be limited by the identifiability of all wearers of this design.

A six-lace, five-colour arrangement would allow about 240 million different codes.