Where
Things Work RightWhere
Things Work Right
** New ideas added 04/01/05 starting at number 185.
185. Help - I'm Being Stolen
A silent alarm for your body.
This would simply be a silent alarm built into your belt that could be
activated by pushing a piece on it a
pre-determined number of times within a short time span. It would be easier
to use than a cellphone, where you'd
have to ask your attacker to hold on a minute while you dialed 911, but
share a cellphone's ability to be located to
within a 50 foot area while in use.
186. Prick Sprayer -
Now that we have a spray that can instantly numb skin someone should add
it asto the devices diabetics use to
measure their blood sugar level. At the push of a button the spray
would cover a small patch of skin beneath the
device, followed seconds later by the prick of a needle. Since the
skin is now numb there shouldn't be any pain from
the prick. (See link for more info.)
187. Pizza Hut Plugin -
A new toolbar for your browser.
Getting fast food delivered to your hotel room during a business trip isn't
particularly hard, it's just annoying
sometimes to stop in the middle of typing on the laptop to stop, find out
what kind of places are available, find their
number, and call them. Since my wireless laptop knows where it is
and the restaurants know where they are, it
should be possible to have a toolbar dynamically build itself when I turn
the machine on. That way when I get hungry
I could just click on the Pizza Hut icon (or whatever) and place my order.
(In primitive places I'd still have to stop
typing and actually call them on the phone, but at least their number would
be handy.)
188. Animal Helmet -
See the world through their eyes.
This helmet would look somewhat like a motorcycle helmet with a clear plastic
visor. Once you put it on you could
select auditory or visual mode.
In auditory mode receivers on its sides would pick up ultrasonic frequencies
and translate them to octaves you could
hear.
In visual mode you'd pick an animal from a controller that came with the
helmet and the faceplate would re-configure
whatever you looked at as though you were seeing it from the viewpoint
of the selected animal (selecting hawk would
sharpen the view, selecting fly would break it down into compound segments,
etc...).
I thought of adding smell for one of the modes but that could quickly become
overpowering (although if the helmet
could be made to heighten the strength of single molecules you'd be able
to smell like a bloodhound and track
escapees or find victims amongst the rubble).
189. Cyber Rosetta Stone -
Sooner or later all languages die.
Considering the rise and fall of languages it might be time to create a
Rosetta Stone for computer languages that
would help us figure out the hieroglyphics of long-dead languages sometime
in the future. For instance, suppose a
JAVA programmer was hired to replace a legacy system that was written in
something like Fortran and was told
that some of the business rules could only be found in that legacy code.
With a computer language Rosetta stone
the programmer could type in a term like 'variable' and see how Fortran
(or any other language) defined variables
in the code. Or, they could type in an operator like the symbol for multiplication
and see what Fortran used.
Such a translator could work both ways. Programmers who were looking at
code in a language they used to know
could type in a piece of code that was stumping them and have it translated
into it's equivalent in whichever modern
language they liked. (RPG I to RPGLE comes to mind, skipping all of the
versions of RPG that came in between.)
The Cyber Rosetta stone would work something like a google search written specifically for programming languages.
Here's an example -
Source language: RPGLE Search Term: DOUEQ
Equivalent keywords/concepts:
Basic.......Do until equal......
Qbasic.....it's equivalent......
VB6.........it's equivalent.....
C.............For x do until......
C++.........it's equivalent.....
C#...........it's equivlanet.....
Java.........it's equivalent.....
Fortran.....it's equivalent.....
yada yada yada................
The stone wouldn't be perfect but it would give the programmer a head start
when he/she is trying to ferret out the
business logic embedded in a legacy program at a company where both the
programmer who wrote the code and
the user who provided the logic have both long since retired. (This can
happen a lot in the healthcare field.)
190. Fake World -
I'm with Stephen Hawking on this one.
By looking at our own culture we can see that there's no correlation between
technological advances and civilized
behavior. This means that the aliens we're so eager to get in touch with
might be just as predatory as we are - only
better armed. We can't do much about the signals we've already sent out.
The best we can do is try to mask them
with a different set of signals.
That's where the fake world comes in. The objective would be to create
a stream of data from a satellite positioned
somewhere else in the solar system that would look like the communications
taking place on a regular world to any
alien race that happened to pick it up. My first choice for the theme behind
these communications would be to try to
put on a convincing display of a world that's rapidly becoming uninhabitable
due to the short-sightedness of its people
(thereby making our world a less tempting target). My second choice would
be to make the fake world seem more
advanced than our own. At least that way we'd get a little bit of warning
when the aliens came to investigate (since
they'd be heading towards the satellite first, which we'd be watching,
it would give us time to run for cover).
Template
for a fake Neutrino Communication Channel
191. Active Biofeedback -
For amateur mediators.
This would simply combine currently available biofeedback machines with
a negative response stimulator (which
could be anything from an annoying whistle to a heatpad). When you're ready
to meditate you'd set the controls to
the brain wave state you want to reach, sit back in your chair, and try
to avoid the negative stimulus. Kind of a
'you're getting hotter, you're getting colder" approach to learning how
to meditate. If nothing else, it would give you
an objective evaluation of your progress.
192. Arm the Vending Machines -
Stop the killing.
The number of people killed by vending machines is admittedly low.
There's no reason we couldn't reduce that
number to zero though. All we need to do is add long arms to them
that would swing outwards as gravity tipped
the machine forward. When the arms were out far enough they would
hit the ground and keep the machine from
falling further, preventing the death of the idiot who was tilting it to
get his coke.
193. Room In A Bottle -
A vacation adrift.
There are plans in the works to build a new underwater hotel in the Bahamas
in the near future so people can watch
the fish swim by during their stay. This idea could be taken one
step further and create bubble rooms that would be
dropped off by cruise ships on their way out and picked up on their way
back. These self-contained rooms could
be lowered to anywhere from 1 foot to 200 feet according the renter's whim.
A collision-avoidance computer on
board would automatically take them to a depth that put them far below
any ship which happened to be coming their
way. (It would also force them to the surface when the cruise ship returned
to make their retrieval easier.)
194. Handicapping Killer Cats -
Not meant for mousers.
One of the significant differences between cats and dogs is that dogs usually
don't drop off their prey - mice, birds,
lizards - on your doorstep. A new, nature-friendly collar for cats would
keep cats from doing the same. This collar
would have several small lights built into it that would blink every 30
seconds or so. Powered by a watch-type
battery, the lights could blink white or any other color of your choosing.
Their flashing would serve to warn potential
victims that a predator was in the area, giving them time to get away.
It'd be frustrating for the cat, but it would also
help guarantee a positive outcome for both the prey and your doorstep.
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