Tag: fabby

Today’s invention is inspired by my friend’s attempts to deal with a phone company -ambitiously enough, via the phone.

She was placed on hold for half an hour by O2 and left listening to dreadful ‘music’ -presumably because they were too stingy to license the use of anything vaguely tuneful.

Ideally, calling a company should immediately put you in touch with an intelligent, helpful human. Whilst this remains beyond lots of companies, today’s invention is a playlist for those on-hold.

Everything else in the arena of phone service is based on a select-a-number process, so why not enable people to choose some music from a numbered list of artists or tunes?

You could even take a ‘feeling lucky’ option to listen to, or scroll through, a number of new, unsigned musicians…thus supporting creative people that the phone industry purports to value.

If you had to make several such calls, the system could remember your favourites and offer them first…or even use the opportunity to recommend something new but similar.

Travelling in lifts is not very exciting for the most part.

Today’s invention adds a certain extra interest.

A normal lift with opaque surfaces has two large screens fitted into the floor and ceiling (the bottom one would need to be protected with walkable glass, as in the deck at the top of the CN tower, for example).

The screens would display high-definition video. This would show a view upwards, apparently through the ceiling and downwards, apparently through the floor.

All traces of the actual lift shaft contents would be gone and instead you could have eg views of advancing into a cloud-filled sky or towards the surface of the sea from the depths.

The upper and lower images would be coordinated so that the passing of this virtual backdrop would appear continuous.

It would even be possible to have objects seem to fall towards the lift and then through it.

I’m always interested in the small scale measures necessary to ensure fairness in games and sport.

Today’s invention is a way to guarantee that a coin toss is actually fair.

For any given coin (grey) a close-fitting, moulded shell is made in two halves and of the same material as the coin itself (blue).

These halves are clipped onto the coin so that its orientation is unknown by the caller when ready to toss and so that any asymmetry in its motion is removed.

On landing, a neutral party removes the top half of the case to reveal the result (or it might break off on impact with the ground).

Today’s invention is a generic door handle for use in hotels and casinos throughout towns like Las Vegas.

This would operate as a normal handle, but, if you wanted to, you could put a coin, token or even an access card in an integral slot in the latch mechanism.

This would activate a small fruit machine display, so that even passing through a door would be part of the gambling experience and offer the chance of a payout.

Today’s invention is a modification to an undergraduate drinking game, based on the famous Jenga.

Normally, I’m told, you have to have a drink, by way of forfeit, when you move blocks other than the one you are trying to extract. Instead, I suggest that whoever extracts a block correctly can pass it to the player of their choice, who then has to take a drink. This comes from inside the extracted brick.

The bricks are made of plastic and each has a hollow core and a sealable bung, which allows them to hold a variable amount of alcoholic or other beverage, chosen by the hosts, before a game commences.

Some of the blocks would be transparent and some opaque, so that players would have a varying amount of knowledge about their contents. The variation in weight, and hence frictional resistance to being removed, would add an extra degree of difficulty.

So it seems that there maybe some unfairness involved in athletics track design. Perhaps left handers are disadvantaged by having to run counterclockwise.

A figure-of-eight track would be possible but would lead to collisions with lapped runners (or if using an overpass, questions about the effects of uphill vs downhill).

Today’s invention is a way to even up any such imbalance.

Since running around circular curves at constant speed requires, according to simple Physics, no expenditure of work beyond overcoming friction in the direction of motion, I’ve assumed that there is no difference between running bends of differing radius.

The problem of fair track design thus becomes one of ensuring equal total stretches of left- and right-handedness.

The shape above provides this, together with straight sections for sprint events.

Counting the numbers of people in crowds is apparently an increasingly contentious task -given that these estimates are used as a proxy for the strength of feeling behind a range of political causes.

There are already numerous ways to count heads -the most sensible approach seems to me to be to use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk process.

Rather than ask the human operatives who do this work, each to count a whole crowd, today’s invention hands each of them only a small part of an aerial photo of the event (taken by a UAV, if necessary)

Where can you find a collection of willing counters? Send the snapshots to the smartphones of members of the crowd itself (perhaps by displaying a phone number on a hoarding which people in the crowd walk past). They might then enter a draw for some event-relevant prize.

The result would be that each subsection of crowd could be counted by ten of its members, resulting in much higher accuracy.

It could be argued that people on a march might be inclined to overestimate the figures, so this effect could be measured by passing certain calibration shots to distant analysts. A better solution, however, would be to exchange pictures between unrelated events.

If you want to have a military vehicle which can successfully traverse hilly, rough terrain, as well as high-tail it (stably) down a motorway, compromises about wheelbase length usually have to be made.

Today’s invention offers a new way to think about this problem.

A wheeled digger-type vehicle could be converted to a variable-wheelbase machine by providing it with a set of road wheels which could be easily clamped to the bucket at the front.

Press down with the bucket controls and the front wheels lift off the surface, allowing the machine to move on the bucket wheels and rear wheels only.

Varying the reach of the bucket provides the possibility of changing the wheelbase whilst in motion.