Where
Things Work RightWhere
Things Work Right
** New ideas added 11/15/04 starting at number 102.
102. Immortality bricks -
Let future archaeologists discover you.
This idea is actually a derivative of one of Saddam Hussein's practices.
He had his name imprinted on a lot of bricks
so his name would be passed on down to future generations. I'm thinking
some enterprising brick manufacturer
should offer to embed plastic dogtags inside the bricks for a reasonable
price. The dogtag would give your name and
a short bio. That information would also be repeated in a couple
of different languages, giving you the chance to
become the next Rosetta Stone.
103. Karaoke Kazaa -
This would be a simple karaoke machine attached to the internet that would
upload songs in clubs as karaoke singers
sang them. A filtering program would automatically delete every song
that was sung out of tune. The rest of the
songs would be divided into musical categories so record executives could
sample them when they were looking for
new talent. Bands looking for new lead or backup singers could also
comb through the songs to find someone who
might meet their needs.
A comedy club version of this might work on amateur night too. The routines
would be filtered by frequency and
intensity of laughs with the talent scout being able to filter out people
who fell below the top 1 or 2 percent. We
might find some undiscovered talent this way (although the routines would
have to be timestamped though to keep
companies from stealing the jokes).
104. 21 Grams -
If poor science can be turned into good science, we have a solution
The experiments done in 1907 that came to the conclusion that the soul
weighed 21 grams were considered good,
or at least okay, science at the time, although they're obviously not up
to today's standards. We should redo the
experiment to find out of if the soul really does have a weight.
If it doesn't, we can relegate this to the urban myth
category. If it does though, then we have an answer that should satisfy
both the pro-life and pro-choice camps - life
begins when the 21 grams shows up.
105. Propeller clearance indicator -
This would be a modified fish finder/depth finder that would be clipped
onto the engine shaft. When the engine was
lowered a button sticking out from the device between the stern and engine
would turn it on when lowering the engine
pushed the button against the stern. Further on down the engine cowling
there would be a forward-looking sensor
that measured the ground clearance between the propeller and the lake bottom.
An alarm would go off if you were
closing in on a spot that you couldn't clear. This would have saved
me a couple of hundred bucks one time turning
around in a small channel. Not seeing how close I was to the bottom
the engine sucked up a full load of mud and
conked out. It would also have saved the bottom of another boat that
hit an unmarked rock not far from the
shoreline. As an added bonus the alarm would remind people that they
hadn't raised their engine when they were
pulling it back up onto a trailer. I don't know how many times I've
seen people forget to raise the engine and have it
scrape the ground when they started pulling the boat out of the water.
The device would probably cost around
150/200 dollars - a fair cost to prevent damaging engines that are easily
worth more than 5000 dollars.
A clearance indicator on trucks might be helpful too. It's not exactly
a rare sight to see one stuck under an overpass
it couldn't clear.
106. Personal bug zapper -
Although it can be fun to listen to mosquitos getting zapped by a stationary
bug zapper, this isn't always the most
convenient device to have around. I'd like to get a pair of gloves
which had fingertips emitting CO2 and glowing
purple to attract the bugs. That way when I'm out camping I could
hold my hand above my head and let them zap
away. Might make midnight trips to the latrine a little more comfortable.
107. Car sunbrellas -
A multi-purpose shade
This device would be clamped on the roof of your car just like a regular
rack. A button on it, easily accessible from
the window on the driver's side, would extend a three-foot section of tinted
plexiglas at a slightly sloping angle (to
maintain stability). The plexiglas would serve several purposes.
1. During a rainstorm it would keep most of the rain from reaching your windshield, giving you better visibility.
2. On sunny days it would cut down on the glare coming off of your hood.
3. For states here in the US that don't allow tinted windows, it would
provide some tinting for people who are
constantly on the road and want to cut down their risk of skin cancer.
4. In the winter it could be extended when you park the car at night to
keep you from having to scrape ice off of
your windshield in the morning.
When considering the idea, keep in mind this sunbrella would be built as
strong as a typical spoiler to keep it from
blowing off while you're driving along. If necessary, narrow slots
running side to side could be added to decrease
wind resistance. Small, awning-like covers angled towards the rear
of the car would keep rain from coming down
through them. If the awnings were designed to curve downwards then that
might direct enough of the airflow back
towards the sunbrella to offset the lift generated by air passing through
the slots.
108. Mobile restraining orders -
Here in the U.S. a judge typically issues a restraining order telling a
stalker that he has to stay 'x' distance away from
the complainant. The stalker says sure and off he goes. A lot
of times this results in the complainant being attacked
again, or in extreme cases, murdered. Why? Because the stalker
simply lied. It might be smarter for us to put the
stalker on mobile house arrest. Under this system they would wear
the same kind of ankle bracelet that people under
normal house arrest wear, only it wouldn't go off when they left the house.
Instead, its companion device (a
fashionable watch, cellphone, etc...) worn by the protected person would
go off if the stalker entered the forbidden
zone (calculated by the GPS distance between the two devices). The
complainant could then choose to press an
override button so the police weren't called, or they could do nothing
and a call would automatically be placed to 911.
The stalker's device could be designed to emit a warning when he came within
twice the distance the law allowed (for
example, at 200 yards if the restraining order was for 100 yards).
That way he'd be warned to back off. For
example, if he happened to get the warning just as he was entering a theater
he'd have to walk away, eating the price
for the show. That would just be part of the price he paid for being
a stalker (and a much lower price than he made
the victim pay in the past). After he'd been a good boy for a reasonable
amount of time and the restraining order was
lifted he could go back to seeing any show he wanted without fear of wasting
the 100 bucks.
Note: As in all things, a certain amount of judgment should be applied.
A woman being released from the hospital
after being treated for a severe beating would be able to make a much better
case for one of these mobile restraining
orders than a woman who said her boyfriend just gave her a dirty
look. (And no, the man who beat the first woman
wouldn't necessarily be safely locked away in a jail cell for her protection
- it's much more likely that he'd be out on
bail in the U.S.).
109. Restaurant Nanny -
If you've ever gone to a middle-of-the-road or high-end restaurant and
tried to eat with children screaming in the
background then this idea might be worth pursuing. The kids' parents would
probably like having it as an option too.
When they get the urge to dine out they're usually faced with a choice
- go to some crappy fast food restaurant, find a
babysitter (not always easy), or take the kids with them and hope for the
best.
A restaurant nanny would give them a fourth choice - take the kids with
them and get the best. The parents could
keep the kids at the table while they were behaving and then request a
'restaurant nanny' to take charge of them when
they got out of hand so they could finish the rest of their meal in peace.
The nanny would take the children to a
soundproof room where she could deal with them appropriately (webcams on
the table would let the parents verify
this). Some high end resorts already do something along these lines (although
they take the kids away for the whole
meal, and sometimes for the whole day) - it's time normal parents, and
those of us who happen to be dining in the
same restaurant with them, got a break too.
110. The Crutch Crutch -
Maybe I just live near cheap hospitals that give out primitive crutches
but it doesn't seem like it would be hard or
expensive to improve on the basic design.
For starters they could make it easier for you to look through your wallet
(say at a checkout line or fast food counter)
by having a switch in the crutch handle that, when pushed, would unfold
a tripod beneath the foot of the crutch
(umbrella-like) so it could stand on its own instead of sliding down the
counter you rested it against. Each metal leg
of the tripod would have a second piece of metal attached on its underside,
forming a reverse tripod, so when you
pressed another button on the handle the legs would fold right back up
again.
Another improvement would be a small shock absorber on the bottom of each
crutch so you'd get less of a jolt with
each step. Done correctly, the stiffness of the absorber could be
adjusted to the user's desired level of comfort.
111. Sailing Supercomputers -
This idea combines 3 pieces of information. If any one of them are
wrong we can just mark it bad science. A link is
provided for each of the pieces so you'll know it wasn't conjured up using
some kind of magic spell.
1. The Hafele and Keating Experiment - In 1971, experimenters from the
U.S. Naval Observatory undertook an
experiment to test time dilation. They made airline flights around
the world in both directions, each circuit
taking about three days. They carried with them four cesium
beam atomic clocks. When they returned and
compared their clocks with the clock of the Observatory in Washington,
D.C., they had gained about 0.15
microseconds compared to the ground based clock.
2. Supercomputers operate at nanosecond speeds, where microseconds are
considered slow - "IBM. announced
yesterday that the Blue Gene/L system had attained a sustained performance
of 36.01 trillion calculations per
second, or teraflops, eclipsing the top mark of 35.86 teraflops reached
in 2002 by the Earth Simulator in
Yokohama. The new speed was reached during internal testing at IBM's production
center in Rochester, Minn.
3. Gravity isn't distributed evenly across the earth. A new gravity
map of the Earth suggests that if you want to lose
weight you should go to India, where the pull of gravity is slightly less
than it is elsewhere on the planet. You
would be slightly less than 1% lighter there.
So here's the idea - stick the supercomputer on a boat and sail it to the
Indian Ocean where gravity is lower to take
advantage of the time distortion effect. You'll get more nanoseconds
for you nanosecond, so to speak.
Speaking of gravity, and its relationship to time, there doesn't seem to
be a lot of literature out there describing what
might be taking place at the center of gravity in the Earth-Moon system
(which due to synchronicity is about 1000
miles beneath the earth's surface). Since that is the greatest point
of gravity in the system time should be moving
slightly slower. Maybe there's not enough of a discrepancy in the
two reference points (earth's surface and this center
of gravity) for this area to make any difference as it makes its way under
the surface (or more accurately the system
makes its way around this point). There might be a bigger discrepancy,
and effect, when considering the sun with its
much larger gravitational force though.
112. The 'Always There' Elevator -
Ever get tired of waiting for an elevator? A universal remote elevator
call button would speed things up. It would
work like the remotes used to lock and unlock cars from a distance, only
in this case it would press the call button if
you clicked it when you were within 50 feet of an elevator (on the same
floor). That way when you reached the
elevator and pressed the call button the elevator would usually be right
there waiting. Some sort of timer would have
to be in place though so anyone waiting on the other floors wouldn't have
to wait forever if you changed your mind
and didn't take the elevator. About 20-30 seconds should do it.
A lot of public buildings would benefit from installing these to speed
up the flow of the foot traffic passing through
them (which would encourage public financing for the devices).
There would also be two other versions of these remote call buttons.
One would be for emergency personnel. When they clicked it every
elevator within 50 feet would head towards the
floor they were on, saving them precious seconds, because the one closest
to their floor would open first. This
remote would override every other call, whether they were manual or remote.
The other would be for the private sector. It would be a priority
remote given only to a company's top officers. This
would override the generic remotes giving them first call on the elevators,
but only for those in their own building. In
other buildings they would revert to generic mode. Even this model
would have less priority than the emergency
model though. If you're wondering why the executives should be given
a priority remote, it's simply a matter of
motivation. If they can get first call on the elevators with the
system then they're much more likely to put a line item in
the budget to install it in their building.
 |