Today’s invention is a seaplane with floats that can rotate (and detach).
The left image shows the normal flying configuration, seen from below.
The right hand image shows the floats rotated to act as extra wings and thus give added lift in mountainous regions.
The middle image shows one float rotated to support the plane, whilst parked on the water.
The other float can then be removed to act as a canoe…or even a minisub.
Today’s invention is a notepad the spiral binding of which is formed from a couple of extended, suitably-shaped ballpoint pen ink reservoirs.
It should be possible to supply enough ink so that they would never run out before the book was full.
This would also ensure that both writing implements never got detached from the notebook (being slipped inside the coils when not in use).
Everyone gets too much email, but nobody ever thinks they send too much.
I’d hate it if we had to pay to send mail, but it seems to me that some inhibition of the urge to cc everyone on the planet would be no bad thing.
I was wrangling with my Twitter feed this morning as usual. Retweeting anything automatically scrolls me up the page, losing my place. That nuisance makes me less of an RTer than I might otherwise be.
Today’s invention introduces a small ‘cost’ every time you copy someone into a message.
The cost is not monetary but in terms of entropy increase.
CCing would automatically cause your Inbox, or a section of it, to be reordered randomly (and the order-by-eg-sender function disabled for a fixed period).
I’ve admitted before to not really getting golf.
Today’s invention however is offered as a boon to those who are devotees of the ‘sport’.
Golf karts shield players from the worst of the weather but not when shots are actually being taken. Has anyone ever tried to use a club whilst holding an umbrella? (Caddies are now so out of fashion and anyway they refuse to run alongside one’s kart).
Today’s invention is a motorised canopy which would unfold as shown allowing players to play all shots (including putting without driving onto a green) whilst staying out of the rain.
No-one who goes to a casino should trust the House.
Today’s invention allows punters some extra measure of control over games of chance…but also limits their ability to cheat.
Everyone sitting at a roulette table would have access to one of the extended arms on the wheel (red).
This would allow control of the spinning to be shared by several individuals.
The croupier would only be responsible for placing the ball in a suspended cup which would be similarly shaken by the players pulling on strings (blue).
The ball would drop through a mechanical trapdoor actuated automatically after a fixed time period.
People would thus feel more involved in the gambling. It would also be very difficult for even a coordinated subset of players to attempt to influence the outcome of plays.
This crowd approach could also be adapted to any game in which dice are thrown.
I’ve seen plenty of videos which seem to show ordinary quadricopters comfortably transporting a mass of 1kg.
That set me thinking about a new kind of parachute.
Let’s assume that battery weight takes up say 90% of that 1kg.
Wire together 1000 or so individual quad rotors into a dome shape, like a parachute.
As a jumper falls, each of these spins, acts as a dynamo and stores energy in a central battery.
Near the ground, the dynamos switch to being motors and the battery drives them so as to break the parachutist’s fall.
Plastic bottles are a godsend in terms of transporting clean liquids but a global pain in the ear to deal with, once used.
The caps are generally complicated to make and they also require different recycling processes to be in place from those applied to the bodies of bottles.
Today’s invention is a plastic bottle which is easy to make, via the usual blow-moulding process, but which can also be used as a cap (ie of the same, recyclable or biodegradable material).
Two such items are shown, moving along a production line, with closed ends on the left and open ends to the right.
The bottle on the right, left empty, can have its base screwed onto the left bottle to act as a cap.
A chain of say six small bottles could be filled and screwed together thus, with the empty, rightmost one as the only cap required.
The end a of any bottle can be cut off (using scissors) and used as either a cocktail glass or a tumbler.
Today’s invention is to link a computer game to a laser cutter (or, in future a 3D printer).
When you achieve some sub-goal in the game, you get access to codes which allow the cutter, attached to your machine, to create a facsimile of some artifact within the game itself (eg the raygun of Zod).
This can then be used to house your mobile phone which will allow additional elements of the next stage of play to be activated.
The phone will talk to the games machine via wifi and its touchscreen can be used to trigger control events.
Fighter pilots have a tonne of gear to support on their helmets these days.
It’s even thought that helmet movements, which are sensed and used to place head-up information in front of a pilot, might be used to control UAVs.
Today’s invention is to turn the helmet itself into a drone within the cockpit.
This would have a number of external air jets attached and controlled so as to unweight this system from the pilot’s head.
The effect would be to lower the neck stresses caused by the very high accelerations of tight cornering in 3D and thus allow pilots to concentrate for longer with less fatigue.
I’m keen to help people to give up smoking (rather than forcing them to do so).
Today’s invention on this theme is a set of covers for cigarettes. A loved-one of someone trying to give up would buy a pack of 20 lottery scratch card cigarette covers.
They would then glue these around the outsides of some cigarettes (increasing the number covered per pack as time went on).
The smoker would have to choose whether to play the lottery or smoke a cigarette, each time, since removing the scratchcard would destroy any chance of smoking that particular one (and trying to scratch in situ would have the same effect).
