Invention No. 104 - Skate 'n Sail

The sail skateboard defeated me and my friends back in '92. It was a tough year on the inventing scene. It was the year we learned that with enough man-power and sweat-equity, we could change the world of teenage trasportation. The plan was assembled late on a wednesday evening just as wind began calling us in a blustery voice at the door. The beginning was a set of plans that still inspire me today. I found some galvanized tubing at Allied and we welded a sail frame together. We even hired some welders from Argentina for the job. Then we attached a sail and anchored the whole thing to a skateboard nice and snug. Below is a picture of what it looked like.














We found the wheels on the skateboard to be too wimpy and the bearings bound on us in mid flight! We switched the skateboard out for a wagon and lo! it worked better. So try a wagon, man!

Invention Idea #103 - Pedal Plow

As we come closer to snow fall this year, lets take a step back and consider for a moment the possibility of finally moving away from the old-fashioned snow shovel. "Snowblower!" you say? But I say NO!! Why does the combustion engine always have to equal the future? Let's move on! I propose a Mountain Bike mounted snow plow. Mountain bikes are beefy so use these. Road bikes under these circumstances are problematic. A couple of years ago I tried strapping a snow shovel to my bike and found that shear and moment forces on the handle were quite extreme. Those forces converted static energy to kinimatic energy and threw me into the snow bank. So, make sure you learn the physics of your system BEFORE you invent! That's what I always say!

Here is my summary of the physics laws governing snow removal: The snow exit speed, Vexit, of the snow is just tan(theta) times the speed of the plow divided by the radial vector speed of the pedals on your bike. The energy of the exiting snow is 0.5*msnow*Vexit^2. So the power required to plow the snow goes like tan(theta)2 and like the cube of the speed (as it should!). The tan(theta) assumption seems valid for snow that exits the plow in a laminar fashion. It is apparent that even a flat plate (i.e 90º half angle) will push snow out of the way but the mound of snow ahead of the plate forms some natural angle of shear to form power that is leveraged by the moment arm. Power baby! This is very important as you learn more about my idea.

Now, let's say we could harness this power and combine it with the joy of riding a bike. Every inventor's dream... Since this is such a good idea, I figure I may need to look at the competition out there.

First competitor: Push some complicated scooper rather than a shovel










Okay, this is really complicated and cool.

Second competitor: Drag a complicated scooper behind you.











Clearly, the tires will pack the snow and make things less efficient. But I can dig this.

Competitor No. 3 - Four-wheeled pedal scraper.



This takes the cake when it comes to complications, but the combination of the three competitors is nothing but green, green fodder for my invention upgrade.

Can we survive in a suburb without a car?

There must be a way to survive in this world of suburbia without a car. I'm inspired by my friend Mike who managed to live this way for a number of years. Living without reliance upon a car remains one of my loftiest dreams. I hope to fulfill this dream some day.

To do this I need to address all of our family's concerns. In this blog posting, I will list all the concerns in their respective categories and address them each. I hope to receive feedback so I can refine my solutions to ensure I fulfill my goal and hopefully at the same time inspire my readers as well.

First of all, we need to consider economics. I did not have a slightly yellow lawn this summer because I was trying to conserve water and save electricity the utility used to get me the water. I was not trying to save the world. I was simply trying to save money. We need this attitude in order to maintain the windfall benefit that river runners used to get.

The table below shows how much money I spend annually on my car.



Let's walk through this:
1. Work
wardrobe at work, jog to bus stop 1 mile each way. wash face at work stop sweating by the time I get there. Use rental car when need to visit clients or use bus. This one is not that hard. Problem is laptop: can't really jog with that.
2. Kids to School
This is difficult. How do I convince my wife that she can get kids to school in bad weather when she has to tote the little ones along? How about this little movie below:



Something like this could do the trick! It needs more cover for bad weather though. This could cost some money... I will have to add this to the table above.

3. Groceries
probably the hardest one of all. We could try the local store's truck delivery service. I will have to add this as a cost the table above. I plan on renting a car once per month. We could do really big shopping with this rental car. About rental cars, does anyone know of a company that rents crappy cars that are cheaper? No need to rent a car with <10,000 miles on it, right?

4. Other goods
We could order things off the internet more than we do now.

5. Visiting family and friends
hmmm. let me think about this one for a while...

6. Doctor, Dentist, etc.
see 5 above

7. Recreation (skiiing, sledding, camping, etc)
now i'm starting to wonder if this is even a good idea... but there is a park near our house. That takes care of some of the problem.

Invention Idea #102 - from archives

As I was sitting in my cube listening to Kenny G trickling through my cube wall from the guy next to me, I began to think I should tell you about another idea I have. You might think I'm sort of like the Don Quixote of business plans after getting all these random emails from me, but I will tell you about my idea anyway. I've been doing a lot of programming and building operations models for work and on the side have started my own personal utility finance forecasting tool (the PUFF tool for short). It is better than MS Money and QuickBooks because you can answer questions like these: What is the probability that I will be worth over $2M by age 60 based on current spending and investments? or What difference would it make if I purchased a new house now or in 7 years based on a housing market volatility of 30%? It hasn't been easy, but I've put a lot of this model together and there will be a day when you and I can sell these for $50/pop to savvy financial do-it-yourself planners.

Invention Idea #101 - from archives

My good friend just taught me the word "blog." Ever since he taught me that word, I've been hearing it everywhere I go. It's amazing what an increased vocabulary can do. By the way, I just wanted to mention another invention idea I have. Hopefully you all can keep this on the downlow. Once you hear about this, you might want to stop all your social network sites and start looking more in this direction. It all started in Redding, CA where the summer days can hit the high 110s and hover just below 100 degrees at night. I would stifle for hours on my bed at night wondering how I could ever survive the heat. I would pretend I had really cold things on my face to make me feel better and help me go to sleep. The night of my epiphany occurred when I acted out on my nightly mental wandering. I grabbed three blue ice pockets you put in your cooler for road trips and set them on my pillow. I learned quickly that an insulating layer is required after feeling the "burn" of the ice. That is when I put them under the pillow and slept like a babe for the next 90 nights. It was awesome.

Now is the time to bring you in on the greatest of all secrets. I have a way to fight the evil Power Company's monopoly on our lives. It is this: Use ice to take the place of the air conditioning at night. You ask how? Let me tell you. They are called Ice Blankets. What you have is a sheet of ice cells that kind of looks like big bubble wrap. You can roll them up and stick them in the freezer (when the evil Power Company has lower rates - between 9:00AM and 12:00PM). At night you simply slip the ice sheet into my soon-to-be patented Ice Shell. The Ice Shell consists of a reflective top and insulating bottom. The top is nothing more than a very thin porous polyester sheet with a fused aluminum coating (like your typical space blanket, except with pores). The bottom of the blanket (the part sitting against your person) is a wafer-thin thermal acoustical insulation blanket that prevents frost bite, but still lets the right amount of body heat through. Let the ice cubes eat up all the thermal energy you can muster, while blocking heat from the room. Keep your thermostat at 90! After you get funding for this one, I'm moving on to Ice Pajamas.

Here is what the competition is doing!














Great idea except that is so cold it could give you frost bite.