Anyone trying to surreptitiously unravel a packaged cough drop during a movie or musical performance is aware of the noise made by the cellophane wrapper, and tries to reduce it by unwrapping very slowly. Unfortunately, this seems to do little about cutting down the level of noise; rather it prolongs the now excruciating cascade of snaps, crackles, and pops as one's neighbors begin to stir, cast angry looks, and even mutter "Humph!".
We propose to exploit this peculiar ability of cellophane and other thin, stiff wrapping material to emit signals in a wide range of amplitudes and frequencies. The first obvious application is to find a really stiff candy wrapper, or, if necessary, to manufacture one out of very thin metallic sheets, to be used for distress signals in the woods, in a mine, or at sea.
Secondly, we expect that a wrapper, regarded as a transmitting sheet, can be calibrated so that any sequence of applied stresses will cause it to emit signals of a nature predictable, repeatable, and unique to that sheet, which can be heard over a wide area. A remote listener with the appropriate information about the transmitter can then detect, record, and decode these signals. This provides a means of transmitting information secretly.
Congratulations on subscribing to Poo Sticks, the automatic animal waste demarcation and collection system! Our fleet of trained disposal agents is now at your service.
Remember when walking your pet didn't involve packing a plastic bag, wearing dirty gloves, and risking backstrain to scrape up your pet's smelly, runny deposits? With Poo Sticks, you return to the carefree experience of walking down the tree-lined byways, without needing to bend, stoop, and scrape, and without risking the concerned stares of lawn-proud neighbors.
The Poo Sticks system is as easy as 1-2-3:
You enter a dark and unfamiliar room and smash your shin against a coffee table while looking for a light switch; you wake from sleep, and have no idea what is making a nearby mysterious scratching sound; you slide under your car to try to find an oil leak but you don't have a flash light.
Rather than dragging around lanterns and flashlights, a new breakthrough has delivered a universal solution to the illumination problem: Behold Eye Beams!
A simple surgical process essentially embeds subcutaneous strands of luminescent ink around the orbits of your eyes, as well as network of tiny high-intensity reflector beads. The ink gives off a steady glow, which can be focussed and directed by your own eyebrow muscles after a few simple training exercises. Normal exposure to daylight or interior lighting is enough to recharge the ink.
"I love being able to read in bed without needing to switch a lamp on or off!" says one of our satisfied customers.
As we know, sports are all about money. So it's a shock to see that, occasionally, the sports behemoth seems to be entirely blind to an opportunity to increase its monetary stream. In this case, I am talking about doubling the take. And it's just so simple.
Most sports require two teams, and so the tradition is that one team (known as the "away team") travels to the statium of the other team (the "home team") for a game. Notice that this implies that every time a game is played, there are two stadiums, one of which is going completely unused.
It takes but a genius to realize that every team should be doubled, to create a home team that always plays at home, and an away team that is always on the go. When Chicago plays Atlanta, then both stadiums are used, and the citizens of both cities can attend home games. This means twice the attendance, twice the number of home games, twice the revenue. I said it was simple.
Naturally, I will accept one percent of the first year's massive revenue increase as a modest reward for this incredible observation.
These days, who needs a watch to tell time? We have surrounded ourselves with electronic devices, every one of which emits a glowing digital time reading. Unfortunately, most of these devices must be manually set by their owner. The instructions for doing so are cumbersome, inconvenient and illogical, and so many devices are never set. And even if the owner dutifully sets the time on a device, all that effort is for nothing if the device is unplugged, or there is a power outage. In most cases, the result is that power is restored, the timer defaults to midnight and begins its count there.
It is said that a man with a watch knows the time, but a man with two watches is never sure. Think of the confusion in a household full of devices whose digital clocks give a bewildering range of precisely calculated incorrect times.
Of course there is a solution, and you heard it here first. Electric power companies will voluntarily shut off service at 11:59:00 every night, restoring it precisely at midnight. This will have the wondrous effect of resetting all digital timers in every household at a single stroke. Moreover, this measure will save 1/1440 of the daily US power consumption, which must surely represent billions of dollars of savings.
Those damn subtitles! Sometimes you're watching a foreign movie and the white type of the subtitles partialy disappears into the snowy field where the characters are earnestly revealing a vital secret. Or you're sitting so far away that you can't make out the text. Or you're "watching" the movie while keeping an eye on the frying pan where you're simultaneously putting together a scratch dinner. Or you're blind. For you, you, you and you, we are proud to announce the release of version 0.3 of the Subtitle Annunciator, a device the size of a toaster, which you connect between your DVD or cable service and your television. Whenever a subtitle appears on the screen, Subtitle Annunciator will read out the subtitle in a clear, strong voice, thanks to Talking Moose Technology.
A companion device, Dialog Denunciator, converts words spoken on the TV screen into subtitles, and is perfect for discrete viewing of baseball games, horseraces, and wrestling matches while in a hospital room, convent, or funeral home.
No sooner had a gleaming new cement sidewalk been laid down in front of our building, than leprous black spots began to appear on its surface. I knew well what these were - discarded chewing-gum from the barbarian oafs who clutter this world with their unthinking ways. Having recently been nearly run down twice by nimrods doing a right-turn-on-red-with-no-stop, I despair of legal or civil remedies for the plague of soulless humanoids we must live among. So I am happy to announce that the chewing-gum blight has been solved, because I have invented a new brand containing a substantial blob of chewable asphalt. Thus, after the purchaser has had a satisfactory chew, and thoroughly prepared the mixture, it can serve as a ready-made patch or protective surface when it is expectorated.
Got kids that don't get along, so you can't send them out back to play? Got a tiny yard? Distressed by neighbors that are too close? Living in a third floor apartment but missing gardening? All you folks can relax now because we are happy to announce the rollout of the split level back yard. Based on principles similar to that modern glory of car civilization, the parking garage, we can now stack anywhere from three to six customized back yards in the space of one. Using automatic sprinklers and an ingenious set of sunlight diverters, grass, flowers, and bushes (under 3' only, please!) will thrive. Access to your individual lawn level can be done via elevator, your back deck, fire escape or other means. Each back yard is heavily sound proofed, and the walls are television screens with sports, educational programming, or nature landscape options.
One law of civilization is that for any product, prices must rise and value must fall. Therefore, we were pleased to see the introduction of the obviously financially unsustainable so-called "Forever" stamp by the US Postal Service, since, given a sufficiently motivated pool of investors, the entire government could be bankrupted; in any case, given the typical run-of-the-mill investors, a tidy profit could be garnered by buying up masses of stamps just before any posted rise in their price, as we discussed in an early article below.
Alas, another law of civilization is, when the legislature is not busy buttering their asses, they are posing as helpers for the people they habitually and compulsively rob. And thus we have the temporary insanity that occurred when, despite the complaints of the US Postal Service that rates should go up, the United States Congress decreed that on April 10, 2016, postal rates for a first class letter should drop from 49 cents to 47. This artificial manipulation of our well-functioning Forever Stamp market has resulted in a more or less 4% drop in value for our investors group. We urge our investors to remain calm, secure in the knowledge that Congress's limited attention will soon turn back to its favorite subject, itself, leaving the Postal Service to cautiously return to raising the price of Forever Stamps, and allowing our investors to float ever upward on a sea of philatelic folly.
Since the nation has a substantial store of unwanted beanie babies, it has been natural to design a beanie baby cannon which, when fired into a crowd, lovingly dispenses, at a high rate of speed, a colorful cavalcade of these once desirable, but still durable, collectible items. Those people struck by a beanie baby will thus have a pleasant keepsake to take with them as they flee.
For those misguided souls who must get a fashionable tone to their skin, we announce the pleasant alternative of the tantoo, a tattoo that manages to be tasteful, and a tan that manages not to be greasy, life-threatening, or off-color.
Granted, it takes our technicians a considerable time to make the thousands of needle impressions necessary to effect the desired skin shade, but we guarantee that the client will get the precise color requested, impervious to fading.
Rather than envying those people who do always make the daring choice, you can now hire one, who will, for a modest fee, go to any restaurant, watch any movie, chat up any attractive person, hang out in any bar, or even attend a birthday party or wedding, bringing back a full report including pictures and comments suitable for posting to your favorite social media.
For a small additional fee, your social self will actual set up and maintain the social media presence you wish you had the inclination to carry out yourself. You are free then, to occasionally check in to your personal site and enjoy the contemplation of the fabulous life you didn't need to bother to actually live.
It's clear, except to the morons who actually watch shows on TV, that the glory days of television are long gone. The days of well crafted crap, larded with a moderate number of only occasionally infuriating commercials, are long gone.
So why did email programmers go to all the work of spell-checking, but they can't see the much more useful Attach-O-Matic feature with the new BETTER-LETTER email program?
Our Attach-O-Matic demon is constantly surveying the text of the message you are writing. As soon as it sees the word "attach" or "include", a pop-up box appears, saying "Let's attach that file right now!", along with a file browser that lets you navigate to the file you want to attach. We attach here a list of testimonials from rabidly enthusiastic users who crow "Never had to resend an email or get an embarrassing complaint about missing attachments since using your splendid product!"
Oops, they actually do this now! Another brilliant invention stolen from me! Say thank you, world, at least!
Given that government (that coven of lawyers) has allowed, enabled, and even sanctified this abomination, resistance is useless. On the other hand, after every shameless land grab must come the inexorable tax man to collect the government's share. Just as though they had discovered oil on their property, for which they are instantly obligated to fork over a tithe to Uncle Sam, the new intellectual property barons must be served with a bill for their self-proclaimed tracts of supposedly golden property. Perhaps one benefit of this new tax will be that the intellectual property weasels will make a more realistic assessment of the value of their airy wealth when it becomes clear that they will have to convert some of it into green paper to be handed to the government.
It's Nature's air conditioner, it gives the glow of health, it detangles hair and gently washes away impurities. But if you are physically incapable of sweating, or are imprisoned in an overly-air-conditioned environment, or need a good coat of sweat to go along with your claim that you've just been to the gym, then "Glow Sweat" may be the product you need. Remember, don't say "No Sweat", say "Glow Sweat!"
It is a tenet of modern economics that numerous public facilities, such as parking, are poorly priced, in a way which does not properly reflect their utility value to the consumer. Economists are in favor of such services as parking auctions, in which people currently occupying a parking spot are prepared to relinquish it to the highest bidder. Understand that this means that some people will deliberately camp out at a parking space simply in order to take advantage of the rewards of such a transaction.
In this spirit, but with no possibility of patent infringement, we propose the creation of a restroom access exchange market. In this market, sellers would be the current holders of a restroom "stock"; a buyer seeking to gain possession of this stock would need to contact the current owner with a proposed bid. Once the seller has received a sufficient number of bids, the exchange may take place.
Naturally, the establishment that houses the restrooms would garnish a transaction fee with every such exchange.
Long lines at restrooms are an eyesore and inconvenience, and yet one is reluctant to lose one's place, particularly when the need for relief seems to increase exponentially with time.
Delicatessens use a simple "take a number" approach which allows shoppers to secure a guaranteed place in line, while being free to take care of other business during the waiting time.
A similar system at restrooms would be sensible way to avoid the unsightly and awkward queues of unhappy waiting customers.
In a college town, due to the iron inflexibility of landlords, there comes a day when half the population must move out of their current residence, and, at a somewhat later and vastly inconvenient day, into another, allowing the landlords time to inspect their property, draw up outrageous bills for imaginary damages, raise the rents, and generally ignore the needs of their clients. As desert rain brings a brief cascade of flowers, this is the moment when storage centers spring to life across town, taking in the belongings of the temporarily homeless, and thoughtfully demanding only a full month's rent for the service. The rest of the year, the storage centers run at less than half capacity.
Clearly, we can poke the landlords up the back alley, while better utilizing the resources at hand, by offering 11 month leases to renters who might like to occupy the storage center cubicles during the off season.
But where will these renters go during the one month busy season? It may be necessary to build a set of storage center storage centers, or to work out an arrangement by which the storage center dwellers swap places (and furniture) with the transient apartment dwellers. This might require some reduction in the rent, of course. But overall, this seems an admirable solution to the growing problem of temporary mandatory homelessness.
Many a man, while visiting the house of a distant relative or casual friend, has needed to use the guest bathroom, only to find, on entering it, that the toilet has been gaudily decorated with a thick, colorful knitted sort of sweater. Perhaps this serves to distract one from the humble function of the toilet, but it also means that, quite often, the toilet lid will not stay long in the upright position. This could be a minor inconvenience for sitters, but for standers, it bodes a real catastrophe.
The potty prop is a simple, discrete, and hygienic device, something like a door wedge, that can be quickly deployed to insure that the target remains in view during the duration of the campaign.
Combine two things you love to hate, and what do you get? The First Church of Christ, Champion, The Temple of Pontius Pilates, or the more diverse and nondenominational House of Tread. The dress code is spandex, and instead of psalm numbers on the notice board, there's a huge screen displaying your own personal heartrate versus that of the average member (also Fox News and ESPN). The preacher delivers a sermon that's good for the mind, the heart, and all the other muscles, while facing the congregation and running on his own treadmill; the various devotees of Nordic Tracks, Elliptical Trainers, and rowing machines are going through their paces, and of course all the church music has a good strong beat that rises up to a challenging crescendo at scientifically-paced intervals.
It's the sport of kings, but with monkeys, and they're not riding horses but cute little dogs. The fabulous costumes for the monkeys are guaranteed to be a draw, while the team T-shirt business is sure to appeal to kids of all ages.
The advent of email, messaging, social networking and smart phones has progressively encouraged people to indulge their fascination with instantaneous messages. Human vanity is an essentially limitless resource, but like any raging fire, it needs constant stoking. Now that electronic messages of various sorts constitute the fuel for this bonfire of vanity, everyone has experienced moments of despair when, prompted by a moment of boredom, one discovers that at the current moment, no one else seems interested in one's existence.
This is where our automatic message generator comes in. Once installed, it inventories the various messaging systems favored by the user. It summarizes the correspondents, and the type and frequency of messages received from each. It then places itself between the user and the correspondents, accepting incoming messages, but augmenting them as needed, by plausible collages of old messages, or, when necessary, by the invention of fictitious correspondents from whom any number of messages may be fabricated as needed, or the "repurposing" of messages intercepted on the Internet that were actually being sent to other people entirely.
At installation time, the user is allowed to configure some of these fictitious correspondents; however, as with any installation procedure, this is done in such an obscure way that the user has no idea of the purpose of the seemingly aimless questions being asked. Field tests were quite successful, although most users refused to believe the extent to which their suddenly lively correspondence was a construction of figments, fragments, and fraud.
Recently, we stayed at a fashionable hotel in Savannah. When going out for a walk, we tried taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and discovered that the exit doors were alarmed - except in emergencies, you can only exit the building through the front lobby. Apparently, this precaution is a way of deterring people from propping open doors and letting thieves and rapscallions in. But it's a decided annoyance for hotel guests.
Several "flesh-eating" plants long ago learned how to arrange for one-way access; they have open chambers lined with soft barbed filaments; going into the chamber, the filaments are gently pressed down and allow easy access. However, should the victim wish to leave the chamber, the points of the filaments easily become engaged and prevent exit.
A simple adaptation of this device gives us the patented sure-fire one-way exit corridor. We simply line the corridor with a mesh of fine, sharp needles that point outwards. Anyone wishing to leave the building finds the needles no obstruction, as they conveniently point ahead; but should a hooligan or ruffian attempt to use the corridor to enter the building, the points of the needles will make progress impossible.
Thank you, Nature, for pointing out the solution to this problem!
Advances in tailoring mean that the seams on a modern man's shirt are neat enough that it is possible for a well-meaning person to arrive at work only to be told (eventually) that he has put it on inside out. Embarrassment and awkward clothing adjustment soon follow. But what seems a mistake actually suggests a future in which all clothing can be made twice as useful.
Considering just the man's shirt, it is only necessary to make sure that the shirt pocket is accessible no matter which way the shirt is worn. Rather than making two pockets, it is better if there is a single pocket accessible from either side. Then, with slightly more attention paid to the finishing of seams and flaps, a man's shirt can be worn either way - and certain shirts could be printed with different patterns on either side, giving the wearer twice as many wardrobe choices. The implications for pants, socks, and other practically reversible wear are staggering.
Someone once attempted to explain how a sewing machine works by stating that the secret was in the fact that the eye of the needle as at the pointy end. I was then at an age where such a remark was sufficient to shut me up for a while. Since then, I have realized that I never found out the secret of the sewing machine, and if sent back in time, would not be able to mystify the primitive peoples by liberating them from the task of hand-stitching.
Since I'm never going to be able to explain the sewing machine, it's perhaps best to replace it by something I can almost explain - that is, the laser. My new laser sewing machine works in total silence (although occasionally there is the whiff of smoke as a seam is overexposed and begins to burn up.) Rather than primitive fibers, the new machine uses the power of laser light to essentially spot-weld synthetic fabrics together. Moreover, by turning the switch on high, the same machine can cut patterns out of fabric or make a scalloped edge.
One recurring and ever-worsening irritation of modern life was the US Postal Service's need to increase its rates, erratically and irregularly, after the United States embarked on an unashamed policy of limitless borrowing and (surprise!) inflation. Comcomitant harbingers of doom were the discovery by the USPS that some stamp collectors would buy one of anything that called itself a US stamp (hence, they began to print idiotic series of 10, 20 and 50 different designs), as well as the abandonment of restraint and standards in the design of stamps, which has concluded in a positive cataclysmic confetti of insipid flag stamps, leavened only occasionally by miserable tradition-confounding money-grubbing crowd-pleasing offerings such as the Harry Potter series, honoring...what, exactly? But back to our story...
After decades of having to buy 1 and 2 cent stamps, and even a new revolting "makeup" stamp when the jumps became larger, I was stunned to hear that the Post Office had begun branding their stamps "Forever", that is, a stamp purchased at the current price would satisfy the postal rates at any time in the future. This useful advance had the implicit side effect of establishing a new currency that was independent of the US dollar. Any fool could see that, to protect one's wealth from inflation, it was only necessary to convert all one's spare cash into Forever stamps. As the dollar lost its value, the postal rates would climb in compensation (and, in fact, even faster than that), so that the Forever Stamp investor welcomed what had once been detested scourges.
But beyond the simple fact that you can protect yourself from inflation this way, there is also the prospect of essentially unlimited and instaneous monetary gains, guaranteed by the US Government. Yes, you read that correctly. The US government wants you to be rich. And here's how it works. On January 26, 2014, the US Postal Service has announced that the first class postal rate will jump from 46 cents to 49 cents. This means that a Forever stamp purchased on January 25th will increase in value by 6.5% on January 26th, and this fact is guaranteed by law.
By special arrangment with the US Postal Service, we at the Forever Postal Savings Bank (FPSB) have already reserved a massive tranche of Forever Stamps whose purchase will be executed at 11:59pm January 25th, a minute before the big change. Thus, those investors who act with us in a timely manner can lock in a 6.5% gain on investment in a manner of ONE MINUTE. This works out to a yearly percentage gain of 3,416,400% (or even more in a leap year!)
As a matter of intellectual property rights, our legal advisers assert that there is no relationship between the rationale behind the FPSB and the arbitrage of international postal reply coupons that supposedly started the career of Mr Charles Ponzi.
No doubt you know that it is a custom in Asia to remember and honor one's dead ancestors. One way this is done is to sacrifice birds, or food, or to burn incense that can be smelt in heaven, or to burn real money, or "symbolic money" (imitation bank notes) that the dead will presumably find useful when making their purchases in the afterlife.
It's time for this system to be rationalized and put on a sound businesslike footing, which is why we have established the First Bank of Heaven. The idea is that, once uncle Bo has died, the surviving family can open an account with us, in his name. The family can make a deposit at any time into his account (please, real money only!), and suggest a monthly allowance to limit uncle Bo's expenditures. The family receives a monthly itemized report of the cash on hand, and is allowed to use Amazon and certain other cooperating retailers to purchase items to be delivered to uncle Bo's heavenly address, with the price deducted from his account. Heavenly accounting rules forbid us from allowing the family to withdraw funds from the account, particularly since legal ownership of those funds resides with the deceased.
Who hasn't gotten up in the middle of the night, wondered what time it was, and wandered out to the yard to check the sundial, only to be unable to read it in the darkness? Now, with our special all-weather luminescent background, the glow-in-the-dark sun dial provides round the clock information, day and night.
In 1993, Jeff Borggaard and I co-invented the "Keep-in-Touch" company. You send us the names and addresses of people you feel obligated to keep in touch with, along with any signficant dates (birthday, wedding anniversary, prison release date), an appropriate relationship style (familiar, reserved, chatty, sympathetic, humorous, formal), and a copy of your signature. We take care of the rest, ensuring that your loved/unloved one receives a card, note, email message, FaceBook posting, or tweet at the appropriate time, year after year, and just a thoughtful day or two before the significant date falls.
Jeff and I were laughing when we elaborated our plans for this invention, having just wasted time assembling cards and envelopes and stamps and scribbling heart-unfelt messages in a race to get to the Post Office in time. A month later, we spotted an announcement that someone else had invented a similar service, so that took the pressure off us to actually do it ourselves. But we want all the credit.
I got on the elevator in the parking garage and the fellow next to me stared forlornly at the buttons. "Five, I think", he said, "But I guess it could be six. I'd better push six so I can walk down if I'm wrong."
Finding your car in the dim, echoing, dirty and indistinguishable floors of a parking garage is a constant irritation. Some people have come up with the clever idea of taking a picture with their cell phone, to record the floor where they parked.
But we're better than that - which is why I have patented the Intelligent Elevator System (IES), which has already been sold to a number of metropolitan parking authorities. Its operation is simple. When the parker gets into the elevator, it will not proceed to a new floor until the "Remember" button is pushed. At that time, the IES camera snaps a picture of the parker, and records the floor. It then proceeds to the ground floor as usual.
When the parker returns from the game, or the shopping trip, or the conference, and re-enters the elevator on the ground floor, pushing the "Remember" button triggers the IES facial recognition system, which recognizes the customer, announces the desired floor, and then proceeds there, entirely eliminating the problem of remembering the floor.
The IES system is moderately priced, easily installed and maintained, and vandal-proof. Ask for details today!
The miserable inhabitants of the frozen northern wasteland known as Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota know the virtues of the remote car starter (also favored by cautious mobsters). You push a button from the comfort of your home, and your car, parked ouside in the snow, turns on, the heater gets going, the defroster begins its work, and five minutes later you can scramble from your house, through the blowing snowdrifts, into a warmed-up car.
Until today, though, no such facility was available for the shivering naked people standing in their bathtubs turning knobs and praying for their shower to hurry and warm up. A great experience has, until now, always started with the dreadful anticipation of that first blast of cold water. Even if you know your shower system, there's no avoiding the several seconds of frigid dowsing you must endure to purge out the cold water; and if you are trying to deal with one of the various incomprensible "modern" shower systems at a hotel, you are also liable to endure several rounds of freezing and boiling water as you try to figure out what controls what.
The fact is, no one should have to operate and adjust a shower while standing directly underneath it; moreover, the operator should not be in peril of being boiled or frozen while experimenting with the myriad but unknowable settings of the unmarked knob or dial.
In answer to the prayers of many victims, we announce the availability of the Little Leroy Remote Shower Starter. It can be ordered only through this web site. The remote shower starter allows you to select a comfortable temperature range and water pressure and to initiate the shower procedure from any room in your house. There's even a timer option in case you enjoy the experience of waking up to the sound and the warm mist of a really well-tuned shower.
For those more advanced users, an internet option is available which allows the shower to be started by going to the appropriate web site. When linked with Facebook, one can use this option to design a shower for a friend, and to view the comments and reviews about the shower posted after the experience.
Adolescent boys also order the remote shower starter so that, when Mom and Dad demand that they take a shower to cut the edge of their stink, they can instead hole up in their bedroom playing video games, while from the bathroom there come the consoling sounds of a shower apparently being taken.
Computer programs with a visual interface typically include a menu bar at the top of the screen. Clicking on any heading causes a drop down menu to appear, with a list of commands that may be selected. This arrangement is a useful alternative to the use of bizarre combinations of control keys, or the letter-perfect recapitulation of the words necessary to invoke a command.
However, particularly when one becomes familiar with a program from frequent use, the convenience of the menu may be marred by the concomitant annoyance that certain menu items are of no interest, and that others, that perform undesired operations, are right next to useful commands that are frequently invoked.
The clutter makes it hard to find what you want. And sometimes, you know what you want, but accidentally click instead on a neighboring option, labeled, perhaps, as "Exchange characters" and only realize what you have done after this command has irretrievably scrambled the document you had been editing so carefully.
Of greater concern are cases where, right next to a command like "Copy" you have "Paste". The first command copies the highlighted text into a temporary area so you can copy it elsewhere, while the second obliterates that same highlighted text with whatever was already in the temporary area. I perform the copy command quite often, and hence use the menu function quickly. It's far too easy for a minor tremor or misjudgment to result in the selection of "Paste" when "Copy" was meant, resulting in the unintentional annihilation of a wad of text.
The Mighty Mike Menu Manager, available only through this web site, finally gives the user control over which items appear in the menu, their arrangement, and even such secondary matters as the font and color displayed. With the MMMM, you can discard the 95% of the menu you never use and rearrange the remaining items for quick and easy access, while inserting a safe distance between menu items that should not accidentally be mistaken for one another.
"The rabbit goes around the bush and down the hole!" were my instructions for learning how to tie my shoe laces. The instructions didn't actually make any sense until after I had accidentally stumbled on the correct actions to imitate that would result in my shoes being tied. My child's laces had the advantage of being made of a wide and yielding fabric that was fairly easy to manage, and that would stay tied no matter how inept the knot.
These days, for some reason, shoelaces are slick and narrow, far too long or pitiably short, and rarely stay tied. Meanwhile my fingers are getting clumsier and my patience for dealing with such a triviality dwindles.
Thus, I was thrilled to meet, and then subsidize, the inventor of pre-looped shoelaces. You may already have seen them on certain high-end shoes without realizing it. The idea is quite simple. Both ends of the shoelace are already permanently looped. This means that a simple operation completes the knotting and guarantees that the shoe laces will remain presentably organized during a walk of any length or speed.
The inventor expects to have versions of his product available in most shoe stores, and if he gets enough exposure, expect to see shoes come with pre-looped shoelaces as "standard equipment" in the future!
You're not quite late for the movie, but you're going to be if you don't find a spot. You go up and down the aisles of cars. Does the car coming towards you mean it just left a spot open? Is that a spot in the next aisle? If I give up and go around to the far parking lot, will I at least be sure to park quickly?
Car parking is a typical example of the curse of imperfect knowledge. If you could just see the whole parking lot at a glance, you'd know where to go at once. But what seems like just a dream is now a marketable product with the Argus Satellite Valet, a simple application that can be installed on your smart phone. The Argus program is able to access real time satellite imagery of the parking lot, identify the open spaces, and highlight the five nearest spots in red, allowing you to park efficiently.
The next release of Argus will include the ability to find the shortest checkout line in stores and the number of empty stalls in the nearest bathroom.
I happen to listen to radio, and I actually use a radio, and since you can buy one for $10 and stick it by your bed, it's hard to see the point of installing a fancy stereo system with a magnificently powered and articulated receiver that you actually can't listen to unless you go to the living room.
Now I tend to put on the local public radio station, wherever I happen to have moved that year. And in my varied experience, the local public radio station is always in the low end of the dial, something like 90.5, or 89.3.
I don't ask much from the radio station, and I have to say, even NPR has long been setting my teeth on edge for a hundred reasons you don't want me to mention. But my biggest problem is that, for some reason, reception on the low end of the dial is awful. Blame my $10 radio perhaps, but there are times when the station simply wanders away, and I have to fiddle with the dial trying to recapture it. Just like with old TV's, though, the person adjusting the reception thinks they have solved the problem, only to step away from the device, which somehow changes the reception properties enough that the signal goes bad again.
Since I personally believe this is entirely due to the low channel numbers preferred by public radio stations, I have developed a radio whose dial ordering is reversed. The left hand position is 108.0 MHz, "rising" to 87.5 on the right. I am convinced that this simple change is enough to fool the radio into giving me good reception for the few stations I am interested in, and I am willing to share the blueprints for this wonderful device to those with similar afflictions.
TeX is a mathematical text processing program which produces typeset quality text from, well, from the most god-awful string of indecipherable symbols imaginable. Here's a hardly hideous example:
A_{i,i} \; x^k_i = b_i - \sum_{j=1; j \neq i}^n A_{i,j} \; x^{k-1}_j
Luckily, it's the sort of things that mathematically-inclined
people are willing to learn, if not love. If you've ever looked at a
fairly complicated mathematical formula, you know it can remind you
less of a sentence, and more of a picture. Somehow, TeX enables you to
describe that picture in a way that allows it to produce the correct result.
Getting to that correct result is a long and miserable process, which involves gradually discovering that when you correct three mistakes you invariably create several more...Your description, written in the TeX "language", is "compiled" by a TeX processor. The one I happen to use is known as TeXShop. TeXShop is a "one pass" compiler, which means that as it looks over your TeX input, one line at a time, it never goes back to previous lines. This is considered an admirable efficiency in programming, but for a user it turns out that a one pass compiler has an annoying effect - if the TeX processor accepts your input as correct, you have to compile it at least one more time. This is so that, on the second pass, the processor can pick up the loose ends of information that it realized it had missed on the first pass. This might be something as simple as citing a reference by number, when the number is not assigned until later in the processing. Another issue can arise if your page numbering includes the total number of pages, which is not known until you are done the first pass.
Since the first successful compilation with TeX is frequently preceded by four hundred and eighty three abortive compilations, it is hardly surprisingly that exhausted and furious users forget to request that final, extra compilation. This means that many people create beautiful TeX manuscripts in which equations are unnumbered, citations are misnumbered, pages are incorrectly labeled, and so on. This the price of elegant programming.
At a surprisingly low cost in mental effort, I have created a new TeX processor, called TeXTeX, which solves this problem permanently. Here's the patented trade-secret: when you call TeXTeX with your TeX input, TeXTeX calls TeXShop. If TeXShop finds an error, then TeXTeX tells you so and stops. Otherwise, TeXTeX calls TeXShop a second time, thus automatically guaranteeding that the second pass is taken. Moreover, at no extra cost, TeXTeX then deletes the scandalously ugly auxilliary files that TeXShop leaves around in your directory, which might include such blights as:
acs2_openmp_2012.aux
acs2_openmp_2012.log
acs2_openmp_2012.nav
acs2_openmp_2012.out
acs2_openmp_2012.snm
acs2_openmp_2012.synctex.gz
acs2_openmp_2012.toc
acs2_openmp_2012.vrb
I mean, who needs this junk?
Watching a crowd scene in the very old silent picture "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", the thought crossed my mind "Surely every one of these people is dead by now!". This is a thought that has occurred to many, of course, and it's hard to explain the little morbid thrill that one can feel at such a time.
Since all the obvious thrills have already been ruthlessly commercialized, we see an unexploited chance here. And thus, we have devised Hellavision.
The process is simple. If you are watching any movie in our database, just enable the "Hellavision" option. The application then looks up the entire list of actors in the movie, determines their current viability, and adjusts the screen so that all dead actors appear in black and white. A special option for Catholic viewers allows the addition of little tongues of hellfire to appear around the legs of the dead.
In those rare cases where a film was shot in black and white, and has living actors, a reverse effect is available, presenting the live actors in vivid natural flesh tones, which is said to be even more disturbing than the typical Hellavision experience, and has put more than one viewer into a prolonged philosophical funk. Hence, this option is only recommended to the jaded, the cynical, and people from New York.
Teenagers and those pursuing a delayed adolescence may switch to the "Zombievision" option, in which the motion of the dead actors becomes desynchronized from that of the living ones.