Snow-melter for LED Traffic Lights

LED traffic lights save vast amounts of energy over traditional installations and last far longer. However, the lower energy use of these Light Emitting Diodes translates into decreased heat output. In northerly climates, when snow storms dust the lights, there is sometimes not enough heat to melt it off, and the traffic lights are rendered useless. (See story here.)

There is ample heat given off by the circuitry behind the light, but very little by the light itself. One solution could be to connect a metal conduit that leads from the circuitry in the back to a wire/mesh grid embedded in the front lens or simply layered on top of it. This would be similar to the rear-defrost technology that most cars have.



CATEGORY: Transportation
IDEATION: November 1, 2009.

Pumped Storage Generation in Underground Caves

Pumped storage is an emission-free and relatively cheap method of generating power at peak times. The idea is to pump water up to a reservoir at the top of a mountain at night (off-peak) when electricity is cheap. Then at peak times, when everybody needs electricity, you can use the pressure head of the elevated water to drive a turbine and generate power.

The problem is that good sites are rare, difficult to find, develop, permit, and operate. One solution that may work for some areas could be to take the whole setup and move it down into the Earth. Dig a tunnel or use existing cave systems that are deep in the ground. You would have the powerplant chamber and turbine deep underground, but the reservoir and all the other facilities could be easily accessible at ground level.


Image adapted from: http://www.tva.gov/power/images/pumpstor.jpg

CATEGORY: Energy
IDEATION: November 3, 2008.

Patent Philanthropy

If some entity were to purchase patents from private companies, they could perform a powerful global philanthropy by distributing the intellectual property so the productivity and benefits of the inventions could be exponentially scaled up by companies and governments around the world. Potential examples would be drug formulas, manufacturing processes, green energy technologies, etc.

This would leave the economic reward for innovation intact, but remove the constraints on the benefits that come when a single company wields that innovation. The purchase of the patent would have to involve a thorough valuation, where the likely economic benefit to the company would be compensated with a lump sum payment. Maybe the company could still have first dibs on contracts arising from the patent.

Another option would be to somehow facilitate or subsidize licensing agreements between the patent-holder and other companies that could potentially utilize the patent. Such an entity would need to have large purchasing power and broad reach, maybe a US or UN organization.

There are movements of similar spirit already afoot, where companies in non-competing industries are pooling patents and licenses in "Creative Commons." (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/business/01proto.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=green+companies&st=nyt)

CATEGORY: Economic / Political / Social
IDEATION: November 2, 2009.

Deaf Could Hear Through Eyes, Blind Could See With Ears

If there were a universal mapping between visual data and audio data, cheap and simple devices could conceivably be made to translate from one to the other. If sight and hearing are two pathways to get stimuli into the brain; where one is limited, why not use the remaining functional pathway to deliver both streams of data?

You could give such a device to young blind or deaf children so their brain can adapt to interpret the stimuli. After all, the theory behind a cochlear implant, for instance, is that you use a mechanical microphone to grab audio signals, change them into electronic signals, and plug those new, strange signals back into the nervous system, skipping over the spot where the natural process broke down. The brain then learns to understand the new signals.

Feeding such signals into the functional senses without surgery would be much less invasive and much less expensive. For the deaf, you could have a pair of glasses with 2 microphones and a heads-up display that would visually “show” the sounds that each microphone is picking up. For the blind, you could have tiny cameras that produce a soundtrack of subtle noises corresponding to visual cues that they are picking up.



The interface would of course be clumsy at first, but with the amazing adaptability and plasticity of the young mind, the patterns could quickly become second nature.

One logical mapping of audio to visual would be to represent the spectrum of detectable frequencies (20 Hz - 20,000 Hz) as corresponding to the range of visible light (380-750 nm). You could make signal amplitudes correspond to each other, mapping a sound’s volume (dB) to a visual light’s intensity or amplitude. Both signals would be in stereo, giving a locational/spatial element, due to the presence of 2 separated inputs.

The result of mapping audio to visual stimuli would be a visualization in some obscure part of the child's eyeglasses like a picture-in-picture TV window; using clever spatial graphics, colors, and motion. The result of mapping visual to audio stimuli would be more difficult – it would have to be a series of noises that would range in various pitches and patterns, be distinct, but not be so obtrusive as to clutter one’s actual sense of hearing. They would likely carry only a limited portion of visual data for important things like large movements or changes in overall light level.

It might be good to have an easily accessible on/off switch so you could deactivate the devices if needed. To keep the devices small and less noticeable, you could have them wirelessly communicate to a mobile device and run off the computing power of an iPhone app, for instance.

CATEGORY: Health / Medicine / Technology
IDEATION: Aug 17, 2009

Interchangeable Holiday Lights

If you're the decorating type, why bother with a new set of lights for every season? (Please reduce the clutter!) There could be light strings with replaceable plastic shells that pop on and off for the appropriate season. You could have snowmen or trees for Christmas, Pumpkins for Halloween, Shamrocks for St. Patty's Day, little footballs for Superbowl Sunday...or just plain ole' lights during the boring times of the year.

For better results - make the lights LED for long-lasting, low-energy awesomeness, and make the plastic shells stackable/fit inside each other so they use less storage space.

CATEGORY: Entertainment / Everyday Life

IDEATION: 2001

Exploding Net --- Missile Defense System

Current designs for nuclear missile defense systems call for an interceptor missile that locks onto the incoming threat via radar and simply tries to collide headlong into it. With both missiles at supersonic speeds, the closure velocity can be thousands of miles per hour...and each missile is only a few feet in diameter up in that big ole' sky. This leaves precious little room for mistakes, and precious little time to adjust for them.

To give more margin for error, I propose that a missile defense system be designed with a robust, elastic net that is sewn with nodes of explosives. The intercepting missile could discharge the net just before reaching the threat, spreading it wide enough so the threat will try to pass through it. The high strength net (nanofiber? carbon fiber? steel mesh? polymer?) would collapse around the threat as it tries to puncture through, swinging the explosive charges into the sides of the threat, where they would explode and neutralize it. And of course, these conventional explosives would not detonate the nuclear mechanism.

CATEGORY: Defense / Transportation

IDEATION: 2002