When I was process engineer, I remember the company had hired a new someone for the accelerated management program and he was assigned to my department for a few weeks.
He was doing some data mining for me and after I had spend a few hours out in the process I came back to my office. He was so excited to see me come back that he followed me into the rest room as I needed to wash my face and freshen up.
He wanted to tell me that he had discovered that Voltage is equal to Current times Resistance.
No; I am not. As soon as a patent has been published, it becomes public domain. Of course I would never mention anything about patents still in the process of being reviewed. But, published ones? (a patent document will be published even if it has been rejected, under certain circumstances). Fair game, boy.
OK, I shall create a thread about weirdo patents I’ve had the (mis)fortune of having a look at. Most of them are not from my field of search, but they are “renowned” anyway
No; I am not. As soon as a patent has been published, it becomes public domain. Of course I would never mention anything about patents still in the process of being reviewed. But, published ones? (a patent document will be published even if it has been rejected, under certain circumstances). Fair game, boy.
OK, I shall create a thread about weirdo patents I’ve had the (mis)fortune of having a look at. Most of them are not from my field of search, but they are “famous” among the experts, anyway
However, that will have to wait until I am back from abroad – That should be the 1st of July.
Ah, the Canadians, eh? Right now I work mostly with the CPC G06F9/40s and 50s. However, I have also done the 30s, and have dabbled in G06F21.
From time to time I have had to check the H04L groups as well (data transmission).
I needed to make some dowels one day so I got a block of wood and drilled a hole through it longwise and then drilled another hole through it down through the top, I put my router in the top hole and enlarged half of the long hole to accomadate square stock. I used a drill to turm my square stock into round stock. Someone told me I invented a great tool. I posted it online and another guy showed a pic of it from popular mechaics almost 50 years ago.
A self-lining trash can. Identical to this design. One of my friends’ fathers was a patent attorney and he did some pro bono research for me; I was only a few months late.
Then I thought to make a device that would just be the dispenser, that could be used in any trash can. Alas, I was too late on that as well.
I thought I’d come up with a fantastic way to double the speed of a computer. As it turned out, I’d merely re-invented the Harvard architecture, which first appeared in 1944.
A million years ago in MBA school we had an oil and gas company (Sunoco?) come in and sponsor working teams to come up with innovative ideas for gas stations. I made two proposals to my team that they rejected (I did learn a lesson about negotiation skills from this, by the way):
Use magnetic strip reading technology at the pump to allow credit card purchases. About two years later, what started appearing at pumps? I think I can safely assume it was already in the works when I proposed it.
Some kind of cleaning solution/mechanism at the pumps to get the smell of gas off your hands. Come to think of it, they still don’t seem to have worked this one out.
I cover a pretty wide swath of physics related classes, G02B, G21F/G/H, and some G01V. The G21 classes are where I see most of my weird stuff, like Cold Fusion.
Yup. Similarly, I found out after a lot of round the houses that it is possible to show that the incircle of a Pythagorean triangle always has integer radius. Again, sadly, that probably predates the invention of paper. :smack:
When I was young and gotten my computer the first thing I researched, besides naked ladies, was superheroes. After reading a Wikipedia so much, I wanted to do a different kind of hero. I pretty much thought I invented the classification of superheroes who use nanomachines for their powers, I was so happy with my brilliance.
Years later when I watched Cartoon Network, I saw a commercial for a show that had a nanomachine powered hero. It even had the basic plot, after I watched a few episodes, with my comic book idea that was inspired by the nanobot idea that can be put in a single sentence: “A Hispanic teen that use his nanobot to saved the world from dangerous ugly monsters.”
Damn it Dwayne Mcduffie. I don’t know if it would be considered ironic since I want to be the second Dwayne McDuffie, except dead; so I’m closer to it than I thought.
I once came up with a metric calendar, and then discovered that Napoleon and Stalin tried (and failed) to implement basically the same thing. So I figured if the worst tyrant in human history couldn’t make it work, I should probably just forget it.
Last week while camping, my dad and I came up with the notion of a tent with air pockets instead of poles. Lay the tent down, stake it, insert a pump and fill bladders not entirely unlike an air mattress that would pull the thing up into a tent shape. Today, I found this at Target. Dammit! We’ll have to make our millions some other way. (Although the reviews on Amazon are horrendous, so I’m sure our design would be far superior, if we actually cared enough to develop it.)
Many years ago, while walking through the woods at night carrying a candle, I mentally invented a device which would shield my eyes from the direct bright light of the candle flame, direct the light down to the path and allow me to carry the candle by a handle instead of in my hand, dripping wax on my arm. Or, y’know…a lantern. I invented the lantern. In my defense, I was high as a fucking kite at the time.
More generally, there is the difference of two squares formula.
A^2 - B^2 = (A-B)(A+B)
For example, the change from 3^2 to 4^2 is (4-3) ( 4+3 ) …
And the change from one square to the next is always A+B.
Oh… fuel… I had the bright idea of fuel bowsers having RFID in their nozzles, and then vehicle owners could optionally fit RFID to their vehicles.
If it notices that you are putting petrol into a diesel car… or vica versa… it stops.
The Little Theorem, fortunately, is a three-line proof by induction (along with a sidebar explaining why [sup]n[/sup]C[sub]r[/sub] is integer divisible by n if n is prime and 1 < r < n). But stumbling across it took time.
Right now I work mostly with the CPC G06F9/40s and 50s. However, I have also done the 30s, and have dabbled in G06F21.
