A twin-blade razor extends the stubble hairs with the leading blade so that the trailing blade can cut it even shorter.
A similar approach is employed in today’s invention: a new carpet cleaning head for a vacuum cleaner.
The leading suction branch pulls the carpet fibres to one side, making it easier for the following branch to extract dirt particles from within the depth of the pile.
I often use a vacuum cleaner to clean up rubble and nails etc when I’m working on house restoration. I hate it when something gets stuck in the hose and I have to dismantle the whole thing to deal with the problem.
Today’s invention is a device which fits on the end of a vacuum cleaner hose (the hose should be made translucent, so you can see what’s happening inside, but that’s another story). The device has slightly smaller diameter than the hose itself, so any potential blockage will occur at the inlet.
When the system detects an increase in motor load due to choking, it activates a set of internal jaws which hammer backwards and forwards ‘chewing’ the plug into fragments small enough to be ‘swallowed’. These are driven by a motor powered by a cable from the cleaner body.
The jaws would be located more than a finger’s length from the inlet. If after multiple chewing motions, the motor load had not decreased, then the motor would be automatically switched off, to allow manual clearance.
“So, just type in ‘ colondoublebackslashwww.domain.nnn ‘ after the prompt; obviously without including the quotes and stuff”
This is the kind of instruction which tech support geeks give to newbie customers, and which usually results in great frustration at both ends of the phone line.
Today’s invention is a browser plug-in which shows an animated finger moving slowly across a keyboard illustrating exactly the correct sequence of keystrokes and without any possible alternative interpretations.
This would require that an image of a finger was stored hovering over each key and that a realtime image interpolation be constructed of the movement between eg A and B.
(It just occurred to me that a keyboard which could be remotely controlled in player piano mode, the keys being depressed in sequence by internal magnets, as if by some ghostly hand, might also help avoid misunderstandings when illustrating keyboard techniques).
Digging trenches for underground piping is so Victorian (not that I’ve got anything against Victorian construction: most of it is still standing).
These days, if you want to lay down pipes without closing the roads and building a trench network, directional boring techniques can be used, but it’s all pretty elaborate, costly and short-range.
Today’s invention is a way to build underground conduits without disrupting the streets above too much.
A hammer (orange) is used to drive a stiff, thin-walled curved pipe underground. The hammer arm length and pipe bend radius can be selected beforehand according to the required distance to be piped.
Segments of pipe are attached together in a sequence (using different bend radii can provide extra directional control).
When the pipe surfaces, it can be driven backwards by the hammer, attached to a reamer of slightly bigger diameter. Finally, a conduit (perhaps containing fibre cables) can be driven through the arc-shaped tunnel and cemented in place.
I’ve been talking to some engineers this week who design harbours. There is a fashion for vaguely annular ones, apparently, among the super-rich.
When they have walls (ie they aren’t just jetties), wave action is intensified within them (acting as lenses) and the boats on the inside end up crashing up and down on 10m waves.
Today’s invention is to make use of this by designing a harbour which can accommodate larger vessels. This would have a conical underwater base into which debris from the ships would fall after waves had smashed them together for a few days. The cone could be dragged onshore using a winch and the contents reprocessed to smaller scales.
The noise would be dreadful, but this would eventually reduce even ships to fragments in a lower cost way than having people with blowtorches do the job in months.
Today’s invention is an app which allows a smartphone user to decide whether his waiting in a queue will allow him to be served before some deadline by which he has to be elsewhere. If it does, he stays, if not, he can save some time by leaving early.
After entering data about departure deadline, level of impatience and desire to be served, the app would continually evaluate the stay/go decision based on manually registering every time someone gets served or chooses to leave the queue. The longer the queue, the more reliable the model of whether to stay or leave.
There would also be incorporated the effect of mental inertia ie the tendency to want to stay in proportion to the waiting time already ‘invested’.
At the very least, such an app would make the waiting seem less onerous.
Again, the boyish obsession with firearms, I’m afraid…
Today’s invention is a cylinder for a revolver with a massively increased capacity.
This would be fitted to any revolver of the right calibre by ‘breaking’ the weapon as usual and replacing the existing cylinder with the one shown in the diagram.
This would be driven from chamber to chamber using the cocking mechanism and a ratchet formed on the inside surface of the new supersized cylinder (exactly the same type of drive as is used on conventional revolvers).
Rather than cart around a collection of Yale keys, today’s invention allows a user to carry only the outer profile of each key,
These can be made of very stiff metal so that twisting within the lock can be sustained repeatedly without breakage.
The key outlines might also be nested, so that the whole ‘keyring’ can be conveniently stored flat in a wallet, for example.
This might take the form of a metal business card with laser-cut profiles in it -each of which which could bend outwards independently to allow door opening.
One of the arguments for allowing people to keep handguns is that these are needed for home defence purposes. There are (usually) legal limits, however, to what a householder can do to defend themselves and their property.
One of the common indicators to a court of an appropriate defensive response to being attacked is when the self-defender can prove that they tried their best to get away and avoid physical violence.
Today’s invention is a low-velocity handgun round for home defence purposes. As well as a reduced charge, each such round contains a small accelerometer sealed inside. This will only allow a bullet to be fired if it has first been moving in a backwards direction for some prespecified interval.
Such bullets are therefore very difficult to use in any attack, so that anyone attempting to buy the ordinary sort can be identified as having some kind of offensive behaviour in mind (without limiting anyone’s legal rights to carry weapons).
This questionnaire in which people were asked to name colours takes no account of eg the adjacent hues or edge conditions, but it’s fascinating, nonetheless.
The map at the bottom was surprising, since you might expect a more uniform, rays-of-the-sun distribution within RGB space. Instead, it seems many more shades are labeled red than blue, for example.
If it’s true that we can discriminate many fewer blues than reds, then this immediately offers a new colour image compression algorithm.
At its simplest, each pixel in an image would be assigned a certain colour ‘depth’ in terms of bits. Fewer bits could be assigned to local shades of blue than to shades of red, for example, in proportion to the areas indicated on the XKCD map.
This could be extended to optimise discrimination at the boundaries between adjacent regions of the map (so that more bits could be allocated to emphasise the difference between eg a yellow and an orange).
