Invention Idea #6

My office kitchen fridge has an incredible profusion of soda cans. (As an aside, I don't understand why: If you want it cold, just buy it from the machine right before you drink it. If you brought it from home to save money, you should be buying it in 2L bottles, not cans.)

Many cans are unlabeled, but some have a name scrawled on them, or some tape, or a business card stuck under the tab. However, these solutions have a couple problems. First, they only provide identification, not security. Second, some of these are kind of time-consuming. The tape, for instance, can't take less than 60-90 precious seconds during which you could be reading some hilarious emails forwarded from the secretary.

Thus my invention, which I call "Club Soda". You slip it on, snap it shut and club it with a tiny key. It would be personalized with your name via a tag or engraving or something. Security and identification in under 10 seconds. MSRP $4.99.

They'll Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chaindrives (Invention Idea #5)

Why do I have to have a job? There are basically four reasons: Food, shelter, medical care and luxuries.

Those are listed in rough order of importance. Theoretically an order-of-importance list is also an order-of-most-money-spent list but that's probably not literally true. However, from the point of view of reducing costs, it kind of is. $500 that I must spend on food is a tougher nut to a short budget than $2000 that I throw away on bingo. Put another way: Say I wanted to stop working. What's the first problem I absolutely must solve? It isn't "where am I gonna get my $2000 of bingo money". It's "how do I eat".

So how would I eat? One common solution is to start your own business. But that's still a job, albeit one where you are the boss. I'm imagining a socialist utopia where nobody would have to do any work at all. We'd just recline on chaise lounges all day.

I could grow my own food in my yard. That's still a lot of work, though. Planting, weeding, chasing away predators, harvesting, processing, etc. However, this is all repetitive, physical work, which is perfect for whom? Robots!

The first thing you need is a big field. (You could do this in your yard, but for reasons of efficiency and scale, farm-like installations are probably better.). Enclose the entire thing in glass (height determined by the crop) to make it a greenhouse. This also excludes many, but not all, bugs, animals and weedseeds.

Install some sprinklers. You'll be using a lot less water than usual for two reasons. One is that because the field is enclosed it will lose less to evaporation from the ground or respiration from the plants. The other is that you can collect any runoff and reuse it. (Why don't they already do this? Maybe it seeps down to the groundwater first? Perhaps my field should be enclosed on the bottom, too.)

Send in the seedbots to do the planting. Seeds and the planting thereof are relatively uniform, so this is a general robot. We may need to bury guide cables underground that will indicate to the robot where the rows will be. However, optical guides, GPS or other technologies could also be used.

All of this, btw, is controlled by computer. It could either be a hulking 1950s-style centralized FARMIVAC thing or an ultra-modern distributed intelligence ant-model thing. For instance the seedbots detect that it's planting time, the sprinklers detect moisture levels, etc and everything Just Works kind of like a natural ecosystem.

Now is the somewhat harder, more nebulous part of my vision. Each growing plant species needs different care. Some might have to be checked for mold, some might need petting or to be sung to or whatever. And they are all harvested differently. You can just cut down cornstalks but you have to pick apples. All this variation means different robot types. That said, this isn't an insoluble problem.

Another option is trained monkeys.

(I googled around for a bit and found some talk about robot or automated farming, but there didn't seem to be any cohesive vision or big plans. In all seriousness, it seems like this is a major lack. Growing food is an absolutely necessary, but peasant-level job. Until robots do it, peasants will remain.)

Invention Idea #4?

I tried to research whether this has already been invented, but I'm too lazy, too busy and too dumb to be complete. The fact that I've never heard of this will have to be enough to show that it hasn't been invented well enough.

The basic idea came from the Wikipedia fundraiser. Why does Wikipedia need to raise funds? All the "real" work of creating and editing articles is done for free. I don't know if their software costs are $0, but they should be. It's possible they might need to pay for specialized knowledge to set up some configuration files and so forth, but that's about it. Oh and servers and bandwidth.

Why are servers still trapped in the "single big centralized cost" world that software development and encyclopedia authorship used to be trapped in? Why couldn't the articles on Wikipedia be distributed across the world? It would be kind of like BitTorrent, but for small files and in real time. Another example, which is perhaps close enough to not even be an analogy anymore, is FreeNet:

Freenet works by pooling the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve various kinds of information. It can be thought of as a large storage device which uses key based routing similar to a distributed hash table to locate peers' data. When a file is stored in Freenet, a key which can be used to retrieve the file is generated. The storage space is distributed among all connected nodes on Freenet.

If Wikipedia were on FreeNet and my browser knew how to get there, wouldn't Wikipedia have zero server costs? The problem of bandwidth still exists, though. Most articles are rarely accessed, but some articles are accessed a lot even if for short periods of time. For instance, I bet the Inauguration 2009 page was reloaded a few times yesterday. Whoever's computer happens to have that article will get hammered. (Also, traffic analysis would reveal that they were hosting that article, which would be a problem for free-speechy issues. Probably FreeNet has already thought of this and has a solution?)

However, I think even this problem could be overcome with some redundancy and distribution. Put that page on multiple machines and everyone accesses different ones. Of course you have editing race conditions that way, but I dismiss those with a wave of my hand (while not volunteering to solve them).

(Reading farther down the FreeNet page I see there are IRC-like and forum "APIs" for using FreeNet as a network in this way, so I'm probably behind the times with my invention idea. However, it looks like they are mainly using it as an anonymous way to share porn whereas I'm interested in saving money by distributing cost.)

Invention Idea #3/Story Idea #1

It's the future. Computers are unimaginably fast. Like, 8th generation Pentium fast! We want to recreate an historical figure, let's say da Vinci. All we have are the collected works.

Step 1: Recreate da Vinci's environment as closely as possible as a computer simulation.
Step 2: Assign a good guess as to what da Vinci's genes would have been.
Step 3: Simulate his life.
Step 4: Compare the output of his simulated life with his real output.
Step 5: Mutate the DNA, keeping any improvements.
Step 6: Until simulation is "close enough", goto 3.
Step 7: Instantiate DNA as a real human.

If the environment were perfect, we could get arbitrarily close to the real da Vinci. And if we had even faster computers, we could get arbitrarily close to a perfect simulation of the environment (which I leave as an exercise for the reader).

I'm going to waive the ethical considerations of steps 3 and 7 in favor of linking here.

Invention Idea #2

Red increases the pulse and heart rate, and raises your blood pressure. It increases the appetite by increasing your metabolism, which is why red is such a popular color in restaurants.

("color red metabolism" gets hits mainly for People Magazine-level science info, so I don't know how well-established or bunked this is.)

The office across the hall from me just got "natural sunshine" fluorescent bulbs put in. They are much whiter than the regular bulbs, which are reddish-orange. It is causing me to wonder what effect constant immersion in red light is having on office workers. Obesity? Or is the above effect only a differential one? Has this even been studied?

Anyway, my invention: blue-tinted "diet" sunglasses.

Invention Idea #1

My kids go to school and (probably) never wash their hands. I imagine 90% of the colds I get started their path to my nose on some doorknob there. How can we sterilize children more effectively?

I thought about blasting them with ultraviolet, but that leaves them leathery and tough. Good for character but hard to chew. How about just blasting doorknobs (and the like) with UV? How would you mount such a light to reach all the crevices? Well, you could make the knob out of glass and mount the light inside.

But it turns out you need a minutes-long exposure to kill bacteria with UV. And glass blocks it anyway. And even if it didn't, it would still be shining out into the room and eyes of students.

However, I just recently came up with another solution: Ultrasound. So a kid grabs a knob and leaves germs behind. He lets go. A sensor notes this and gives a brief blast of ultrasound, dismembering any organics. The next kid grabs and she doesn't pick up the nasties.

Google says this works, but talks about being immersed in liquid. Maybe that can be worked around. Or a gel coating on the knob. Or fill the school with water and equip the kids with scuba gear.