Mostly Harmless

Something simple. Something easy. Something already done. (Hey, at least I looked this time.)

This faucet, the speech recognition. Sweet.

I want temperature settings for brushing my teeth, washing my hands, drinking, etc. No problemo with this baby. Best of all, they’re looking for investors!

Ya know, I gotta stop deleting that e-mail from MP3.com without reading it, or at least do a search for cassette tape-shaped MP3 players — and thus save countless minutes of R&D time.

Ladies and germs: RomeMP3.

At least the MP3 player that I invented in my head was Mac compatible. I like to think that the sound quality of my fictitious player is better too. And the battery life… the sucker runs forever!

For my next invention I think I’ll create a wireless phone that can be used anywhere within various large transmission"cells"in a city. I’m going to name it after my pet goldfish, Nokia.

Invention Week, Day #3: Adaptive Cruise Control.

I’ve wanted"adaptive cruise control"for years — something that speeds up and slows down automatically based on the distance and rate of closure to the car in front of me. All I’ve ever seen is a handful of self-driving car demos on TV years ago… nothing that I could actually buy, just some stuff that was going to be ready"in the future."

The future is now!

It seems that North America is not big on the whole ACC concept, unless you’re talking about the Eaton Vorad EVT-300 Collision Warning System with SmartCruise — which you can get for your Mack truck for $2,000 - $3,000. Look, here’s a list of here).

A logical progression, IMHO, of cars that drive themselves: no more traffic lights or traffic jams.

I yearn for the happy days in the not to distant future of really smart cars that drive by themselves; with people in them, I presume. But I’m not talking about that wimpy"caravaning down the highway, inches apart."I want the good stuff.

I want smart cars in the city that never need to stop for traffic lights because the opposing streams of traffic will automatically create gaps between the cars *just* big enough to let the other cars through. If you could get it to work at about 60 mph that’d really make it scary!

There are, of course, some significant issues preventing this from happening anytime soon. Like the small problem that you need to wait until everyone has a computer driven car, otherwise some old guy will break formation and ruin the whole damn thing. Let’s not forget the fiendish amount of programming necessary to coordinate near misses between thousands of cars charging towards each other at ramming speed. And then there’s the whole communication between the cars problem. I don’t see the amount of data being the problem, per se, but how does a car in the middle of the pack know that it’s in the middle of the pack with all those damn network packets flinging through the air. There’s gotta be a whole lot of really accurate position tracking going on, really quickly; but that’s what makes it interesting!

The biggest obstacle, however, could be the tremendous potential for lawsuits. One little programming glitch and you could create a vehicle pile up of epic proportions. (But I’d like to think that the independent collision avoidance systems would create an even more spectacular show as dozens of cars automatically dodge and weave without hitting anything at all.)

Nothing so grandiose as an MP3 player today; something a little more functional. A dishwasher.

Any bozo can make a dishwasher that washes a whole bunch of dishes at a time, but it takes a special sort of bozo (that would be me) to want one that just washes a single plate or bowl at a time.

My ultimate dishwasher would be a multi-armed robotic device built onto the sink. Probably three arms: two for holding, one for scrubbing. You’d also need some manner of vision and/or touch sensors. Let’s not forget plenty of nifty programming for the control system. So… not a weekend project, most likely.

The more practical version would be very simple in comparison. Stick a plate in a slot, spin the plate with some rollers, apply soapy rotating brushes to both sides for a few rotations, give it a rinse. QED.

For bowls you need to articulate the rotating brushes a little bit, but no big deal… (since it’s so easy to picture in my head, I assume it is also easy to build.

I want one of these because, as a single dude with sole possession of the TV remote, I’m usually"cooking for one"and end up washing one plate, one fork, and a frying pan — 3 times a day, every day. (I’ve been on a dish washing kick for a few months now.)