Inventions to change the world.

Printable solar panels via Nanosolar. Nothing fancy nothing amazing, just pushed the technology to be easy and cheap to manufacture. They can manage to print it out for about $.3 a watt. Which is pretty much cheap enough to use as wall paper.



NuVinci CVT (continuous variable transmission) is a nifty little design to change gears without set gear levels. They are currently using the design for bikes. My brother would use it for a unicycle (a gear shift on one of those would be like magic). And it probably is going to have some great applications in wind turbines allowing them to maintain their power output without spinning so fast as to burn out or going so slow as to generate no power.

It doesn't exactly change everything, but it does make a number of things considerably better, smaller, and some things previously non-economical become economical. I think a car with a continuous transmission would be pretty awesome... and I bet it wouldn't blow out as quickly.

Segway

One of the oddities of invention was that of the segway, this machine set to replace walking. One quote from an early reviewer, "We have to redesign the city" -- Sounded like a rave review at the time. And it may have been, however it's the kiss of death.

We can't redesign a city after the fact. They are stuck that way. They evolve slowly to meet needs, kludge together solutions, and are locked in place. Really, that line was the first sign of failure for the machine.

Invention of the Day

Robotic reversing vasectomies. The obvious fact is, one's testicular junk is just hanging there. It is, by far, the easiest method of birth control, you get at it and get at it once. However, even with plenty of access, the obvious plan is to cut the vas deferens. This isn't a good sounding idea for men (at least not all men). Surgical reversal is possible, though, expensive and not something you want to plan on having in advance.

This is where my invention comes in. Reversing vasectomies. Rather than cutting, why can't we use any other method of stopping something at A from getting to B? Clamping, removing, bridging, blocking, etc. I propose, for your favorable consideration, cyborg penis! Basically hook something to the vas deferens which prevents sperm from getting through, until you want it to. It wouldn't be hard to power something and switch the settings (perhaps even installing a password) through thin scrotal tissue. One could reverse their own vasectomies repeatedly. Turn it off with your wife, turn it on with your lover. Leave it off until you choose to have kids. Basically, it would be actual birth *control*. You could turn that sucker on and off at will.

This would have mass appeal. If you might sometime in the future want some kid, you could still get one while you sew your wild oats. It doesn't have the this is forever feel that snipping that cord does, and rather than breaking ones junk... it gives you awesome cyborg powers. It would be something men might want to have, just to have. Now that's an invention! The reduced number of unplanned pregnancies, simplicity in the realm of birth control, and easing the options for women (none of which are remotely as easy) are just little bonuses.

Panphones to cure ToTs.

A few years ago, there was a study conducted on ToTs, tip-of-the-tongue that concluded that the phenomenon was when the brain knew the word but couldn't access the proper phonemes the word had to vocalize the word. One popular strategy to resolving this problem that I personally use is to run through the alphabet in my head until something clicks. A better solution would be to memorize a short phrase with every phoneme in English within it.

The good cat just found grizzly bear poo.
Sharks having lawyers chose, why marry you?

Not quite perfect, but most are there. Actually kind of hard to make one up. Rhyming would help, but a needed part of rhyming is to introduce a duplicate phoneme.

Invention of the Day

Fill levees with that diaper stuff. Absorbent gelling material is actually fairly cheap, and it seems like several pockets of it would have the actual ability to stop a leak. Pretty much anybody who does such things knows that all it takes is a trickle of water and it's over. A trickle leads to a spray, to a good seeping, to a big hole and finally to a massive breach. All in a very short period of time. If you could have some kind of built-in method to stop the trickle, you'd be set.

If it's good enough at stopping the poop of babies, it should be quite apt at fixing much smaller problems like massive floods. If dams(parents) can use it, dams (walls to stop water) can use it!

Secondly, perhaps the stuff could be made to independently assemble a make-shift levee.
You could get a large container of the stuff hook it unto a chopper and dump in on some quick flooding area. Turn most of the water going a certain direction into gel and divert the river.

It would kill fish, not sure how the hell you'd clean it up.

Invention of the Day

UPS systems are nice, but they are dreadfully inefficient for a product which needs every precious second of time. However, note the conversions:

AC wall -> DC battery -> AC UPS -> DC power supply.

Why can't I get a UPS that converts the power to DC, stores it in a battery, and delivers the power to a 12v (power supply/regulator/splitter) without converting. Firstly, this will stop a bunch of worthless conversions of the power current, this will replace a power supply with a simple box which splits and regulates the power flow that won't need fans and other such things.

Also, this would allow for pretty quick easy server rack, multi-power supply. It turns out you can save a ton of power if you have one large power supply to serve a large rack of computers. This would do roughly the same thing but add UPS.

Worst case a few super capacitors could one day be put into the power supply after the conversion of DC power and provide some nice functionality. That or just convert all the computer's memory to non-volatile.