Tag: fabby

Today’s invention is a way for a lecturer to ensure that people don’t all sit at the back of a theatre.

All the flip-up seats are initially locked in the up position (apart from those in the front row).

A sensor mat at the door of the room counts people entering (approximately).
When the number of people inside approaches that of the number of seats in the front row, the second row of seats is released so they too can be flipped down.

The process repeats so that the theatre fills from the front (or in any other pattern the person giving the talk requires).

Today’s invention is an airport runway which consists of a bed of tightly packed rollers. Each of these can be rotated at a variable speed and is provided with a controllable, vertical spring and damper.

This arrangement, although more expensive than tarmac, has certain advantages.

I’ve been watching various electronic displays during the recent snowy conditions in the UK. These rarely have wipers of any kind.

It seems to me that today’s invention should be a public information display which senses how much of its output is being obscured by snow or mud or whatever and squeezes the message into the part of the display which is not yet affected.

This could be done by mild distortion of the characters so as to fit the clear part of the screen and/or by preferentially showing those data which have been previously tagged as most salient (perhaps cycling these so that all of the message is seen sequentially).

I began thinking about how much time each of the segments in a 7-seg digital clock display spent being illuminated.

The image shows the distribution I calculated (with red more frequently ‘on’ than orange, and the central colon omitted).

Today’s invention is to make such clocks with more robust segments corresponding to the red patches etc, in order that product lifetime is maximised. This might apply more to the mechanical flipover devices that can be found in eg airports and train stations.

Extending this thinking to digital calculators, if financial data obey Benford’s law then maybe the longterm distribution of segment activity for a business’ calculator (clearly different from the clock example above) could be recorded in order to indicate, in an instant, whether eg a company’s financial transactions were fraudulent or not.

If you have some viscous fluid between two concentric, rotating cylinders, blobs of dye in it will be smeared out -but then re-formed when the movement is reversed.

Today’s invention uses this laminar flow reversibility as an aid to security.

An instruction about how to open a lock or access a safe can be printed in the form of a coarse, dye-blob message within the apparatus above. The cylinders are then rotated backwards and forwards in a sequence of moves known only to those authorised to access the system.

Such a person can walk up (seeing only an indecipherable smear), reverse the moves and read the secondary message (which might be a vault or pin code).

The fluid would then be flushed and the access details rewritten with a new sequence of moves for the next person.

Today’s invention is (yet) another way for people to escape from skyscrapers in an emergency.

Since these buildings tend to cluster together in city centres, if there is a fire in one, the idea is to run cables onto the roofs of surrounding, shorter towers.

These cables would connected to several other neighbouring buildings and be embedded in walls and ground surfaces.

In an escape situation, the cables would be rapidly tightened (using winches or dropweights) and a sequence of previously attached, window-sized pods would be filled with people and slid down the cables to comparative safety.

Spacecraft may someday travel so far from Earth that telemetry and software upgrades direct from the home planet become impractical.

Astronauts may want to effect improvements or the software may be capable of self-modification. Under those circumstances, carrying one copy of all the operating software on board will be a very risky business.

Today’s invention is a remote backup mechanism for vehicles traveling in deep space. Before making any changes to the operating programs, these would be copied onto a number of hard disks on board a satellite vehicle (together with any valuable data gathered as part of the mission). This would contain shielding to minimise the effects of cosmic rays.

The backup vehicle would be launched on a parallel trajectory and kept flying at a safe distance from the mother ship until any upgrade was verified and the two craft could rendez-vous again. In the event of an accident on the main craft, eg fire or memory corruption, the satellite vehicle would be able to dock automatically and attempt to restore the systems to their earlier condition.