Where
Things Work RightWhere
Things Work Right
** New ideas added 11/01/05 starting at number
261.
261. Blood for My Eyes -
A fair trade.
A lot of people who have vision plans sponsored by their company don't
take advantage of them (because of time
constraints in my case). A workable solution might be to pair up
blood mobiles with eye care companies. The
companies would pay the fuel and mechanical repair costs for the blood
mobiles (a public benefit) and in exchange
get a chance to examine people who have nothing much else to do while their
blood is being withdrawn. It would
be a win-win-win situation. The cost of running blood mobiles would
decrease, glasses/contact lens sales would
increase, and some employees would finally get to see where they're working.
The only hurdle we'd have to
overcome is increasing the speed at which a vision screening can be done.
262. Automatic Safecracker -
An improvement on today's methods.
In the back of the latest issue of Popular Mechanics there was an article
profiling a safecracker who helps police,
banks, private companies, etc.. crack open safes that they needed opened.
The part I found hard to believe was
his reliance on an amplifier and headset. Here's a quote - "Along
with a light touch, amplifiers help LaBarge discern
the minute mechanical discrepancies that give away the winning numbers."
The part I found hard to believe was the
reliance on the human ear to detect these discrepancies. It seems
to me that it would be too hard to design a cup
the at would fit over the dial and spin it, taking note of the sound each
number emitted with a much higher degree of
discernability than the human ear can muster. After the first spin
most of the numbers would return a fairly common
audio response. A couple of more spins should narrow it down a single
number that gives off a unique signal. After
that it would simply be a matter of turning the dial back and forth to
find the same signal when its given off by the
other numbers in the combination. (Being mechanical devices, the
signal should be similar for each right number.)
Maybe this idea is baked though and the guy they profiled uses his ear
because he gets paid by the hour.
263. Annoying Criminals -
There's a type of stroke in the right hemisphere of the brain which, when
it occurs at the right spot, always results in
a condition where the victim doesn't recognize that his or her left arm
belongs to them. They always think it belongs
to someone else. And it usually behaves oppositionally to whatever
the victim decides to do with their right hand.
Example - while the right hand is buttoning a shirt the left hand will
start unbuttoning it. This type of stroke can be
intentionally induced (although to my knowledge volunteers have only had
its effects mimicked via directed magnetic
waves).
So how would this be useful as a punishment for criminals sentenced to
a life term? It would interfere with whatever
their plans are and generally make prison a safer place to be. For
instance, if the right hand tried to stab a fellow
inmate then the left might try to block it. There's no guarantees
of course, but based on one patient who claimed her
left hand was trying to strangle her in her sleep it might be worth a shot.
Two side notes:
1. The effects on left-handed inmates would be even more pronounced.
They'd suddenly be unable to use the
hand they naturally favored.
2. An odd fact emerged when they did a large scale study on patients who
had this type of stroke. Women almost
always thought their left hand belonged to their husband; men almost always
thought their left hand belonged to
their mother-in-law. Very strange.
264. Bunk Cots -
Conserve valuable floor space.
When looking at the pictures of the Superdome and Astrodome being used
for shelters it occurred to me that a lot
of space was being wasted simply because cots only had one level.
Stacking them2-3 high would create a stability
problem if you did it bunk bed style, but if they were designed as fold-outs
in an A-frame shape (2 cots on the lower
level for each 1 above it) stability wouldn't be an issue and we could
fit a lot more people into the limited amount of
space that's available. I'm not sure how high we could go but if
the fold-outs could be attached (somewhat like a
cheerleader pyramid), we could squeeze in quite a few more without losing
any open floor space.
265. Double-hulled Levees -
Now that a lot of the land behind the breached levees has become close
to uninhabitable it might be a good idea to
build a second levee system behind the first (with a concrete floor between
the two to help keep any break from
drilling a hole in the backup levee). That way the city would have
the same kind of backup system that a lot of
modern ships do.
266. Get Them Away From Me -
Shark attractant for surfers
Since we don't seem to be having much luck creating an effective shark
repellant maybe we should approach the
problem from the opposite direction and create a shark attractant that
would lure sharks away from swimmers and
surfers just long enough for them to get out of the water. I'm thinking
of something along the lines of a small inflatable
stick figure that could be shot seawards. When it hit the water the
figure would inflate and start wiggling in the water
(thanks to a small battery it carried). A water soluble container
would also release a concentrated oil that smells as
much like blood as we can make it. If the scent is strong enough
it might get the shark's attention long enough for
swimmers to make it to shore. (If something like this is ever made
the manufacturers will have to be protected
against lawsuits stemming from any accidental release of the scent.)
267. Bus Booties -
For emergency evacuations.
They already make adapters for trucks so inspectors can drive down railroad
tracks. It shouldn't be too hard to
design a pair of clip-on booties for buses so they could ferry evacuees
a safe distance away from whatever city is
being evacuated. A pair of clip-ons would be put on the tracks, the
bus would drive up onto them, the ends would
be flipped up to snap onto the tires (somewhat like snow chains do), hydraulics
would raise the bus enough for its
tires to clear the tracks, and off it would go. Several convoys could
be run during a 24 hour period, giving people a
way out of town that wasn't clogged with traffic.
Of course, it might even be more sensible to park a couple of freight trains
in the city when an evacuation seems
imminent. Several thousand people could be easily loaded onto the
trains and driven out of town that way once the
order came to evacuate, and it wouldn't take hundreds of bus drivers to
do it. But that might make too much sense.
268. Google - Disaster
One of the people trying to help families get back together after Katrina
pointed out on the news tonight that people
were mistaken if they thought all of the missing children databases were
connected. Just because you put a picture
of a child on the Red Cross web site doesn't mean it will be pushed to
all of the other databases.
Google could fix this. It already has the image search feature.
All it has to do it publish a naming convention for
photos, something like "Disaster - Katrina - Male - Caucasion - Current
Location - Name'. That way when it screen
scrapes the web it will pick up all of the available pictures from unconnected
databases and put them on one site for
searching.
269. Identifying the Diehards -
There are always people who won't evacuate.
It's going to cost a lot of money to identify the bodies left in Katrina's
wake. I wonder if it would be more
cost-effective in the future to issue everyone who's in harms way the same
kind of wristband they put on hospital
patients. As an incentive the government could offer to buy back
any that were still on people's wrists after the
emergency for 20 bucks or so. These wristbands could also help identify
children who got separated from their
parents in the rush out of town and who are too young to let anyone know
who their family is.
As an offshoot to this idea, if RFID chips were embedded in the wristbands
it would make it easier to find the
bodies of those who stayed behind and were killed.
270. Tired of the Same Old Scene -
Bits and pieces that people would like to see
It doesn't take seeing a lot of movies to realize you're beginning to see
some common elements that keep popping
up. Car chases are a good example. They're a common element
in many movies and usually something ends up
getting in between the chased and the chasers.
This web site would give screenwriters a new source of material to draw
inspiration from and give the general public
a place to send snippets of scenes they've thought up that might fit into
a movie somewhere. For instance, I once
knew a guy who said that if he ever decided to commit suicide he'd do it
by skydiving out of an airplane and try to
land right on top of one of the castle spires at Disneyworld. Never
seen that in a movie yet. It's a gross example,
but it's the kind of new thing one might expect to pop up on the suggested
web site. If they turned your idea into a
scene you'd at least be able to pat yourself on the back for giving people
something new to watch.
271. A Breath of Fresh Air -
To prevent carbon monoxide poisoning
One of the smarter companies that make air conditioners should come up
with a model that has a carbon monoxide
detector built into it. That way in addition to just sounding an
alarm it could start pumping fresh air into the house.
Even if this happened in winter, when it's most likely to occur, getting
a little cold in exchange for loosing a bit of
grogginess would be worth the trade.
272. Auto Innovator -
Based on the Java way of thinking
After looking over some of my recent ideas it occured to me that a lot
of them were innovations instead of inventions,
innovation being defined as taking two existing ideas and combining them
to make an improved version of one of the
two. The 'A Breath of Fresh Air' idea is a good example. It
takes a carbon monoxide detector and combines it with
an air conditioner to make an improved version of the air conditioner.
With this thought in mind I began to wonder if we could adopt some of the
structures in Java and apply them to real
world objects. For instance, in Java an object is defined as having
attributes and behaviors. If we created a
database of objects with a list of their positive and negative behaviors
(forget the attribute piece for a minute), it
might be possible to create a program that would match the positive behavior
of one object to the negative behavior
of another object and produce a list of innovations. The tricky part
would be creating a lexicon that described each
objects' behavior in a way that would allow the cross-referencing to take
place.
273. Become One with the Hurricane -
A new subscription-based webcam site.
This site would cater to those who are interested in seeing what's it like
to be inside a hurricane from the comfort of
their own desks. Whenever a hurricane formed the new company would
fly one of those hurricane hunter type of
planes into the eye and drop a remotely powered plane similar to the preditor
into it. From there the preditor would
periodically launch webcams into the storm so viewers could go tumbling
along in the winds. The preditor itself
would monitor the surrounding windspeed to make sure it stayed positioned
safely in the center of the storm.
274. Blazing Dogs -
Inspired by two true stories.
A couple of newspaper stories. In the first one police were describing
how their tasers proved ineffective against a
group of dogs that were attacking someone. In the second one police
reported that a man burst into flames when
they fired their tasers at him (Raleigh, North Carolina). So maybe
you can see where this is going. The reason the
man burst into flames was because he had spilled some gas on himself just
before he decided to resist arrest. By
combining the two stories we get a new form of taser, one that has a small
capsule of gas just ahead of the taser
needles. When the capsule hit a pitbull (or some other dog that was
in attack mode), it would rupture, spreading a
small amount of gas on the dog. Seconds later the needles would hit,
igniting a small flame. Seems like this would
have a better chance of getting the dog to back off. (Of course the
police might also want to have a fire extinguisher
handy in case the dog took off and started leaving small fires in its path).
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