Patents and Inventions
I tinker and invent for fun. I've pursued patents, too, though more with the aim of learning about the law than to profit. Expectations: met.
- Biaxial Idler for Continuously Variable Transmission, U.S. Utility Patent, No. 5,538,484 (July 23, 1996). You might say that this patent reinvents the wheel, giving it not just one but two axes of rotation.
- Semi-Prone Bicycle, U.S. Provisional Application for Utility Patent, No. 06/015856 (May 28, 1996). How do you ride this thing? Think "Superman on wheels."
- Recipe for a Force Field (July 1, 2009). A few, um, technical details remain unresolved, granted, but in theory this could protect spacecraft from meteors and orbiting trash (as well as protecting x-wing fighters from laser cannons).
- Folding Heart Card (February 13, 2008). Though I cast this original origami fold into the public domain so far as copyright goes, it in theory might remain patentable.
- Bell's Serpentine Wall (March 5, 2006) (notes deleted). As explained separately, this variation on the serpentine wall popularized by Thomas Jefferson improves on that earlier version by economizing on materials and improving resistance to tipping. I like the way it looks, too.
- My musings about fractal coordinate systems fall far short of a patentable invention, granted. Still, I remain intrigued by the possibility of using a volume-filling fractal curve to define 3-D space using only 2 coordinates (one specifying the curve's iteration and the other specifying the distance on the curve from the axis). You could never perfectly define a point's position with that method, of course, but you could define it to any given degree of precision.
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