New Direction

This blog is taking a left turn. The Bahamas experience is what it is, and is no longer novel for me. I am still living in the Bahamas, making my way in technology and doing neat things. However, silly and amusing blog topics no longer hold my interest, and you may have noticed that I have stopped posting for a while.

The new leitmotif of this blog will be ideas of mine that I think we will see in the future. And since I have way too many invention ideas, I will begin posting some of them here.

So if you have been a regular reader, thanks for being so, and I hope that you stick around for the Cosmological Cabbage View of the Future. This will be the "US Today" tabloid of futurism.

The Phuture of Pharmaceuticals

Here is another fearless prediction about the future of pharmaceuticals. I classed this under "things that need inventing", but I think that this prediction will happen more out of greed of the pharmaceutical companies rather than a genuine need of the people.

We all saw what happened when Viagra was accidentally invented. It because a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. That is when the drug companies first saw the light. It is more profitable to manufacture "convenience drugs" rather than to find drugs that cure diseases, alleviate suffering and make people healthy. Drug companies stopped being a boon to mankind and began to service the "luxury" niche of the drug market, which they accidentally created.

There will arise drug companies whose sole purpose is to manufacture and sell drugs of convenience. What kind of drugs? It is only limited by your imagination. Here are a few examples of what may come to pass (so to speak):

1) The "Mommy Mommy I have to pee!" drug. You have the kids in the car on a long road trip. Just like Gravol for motion sickness, you give them a drug that enables them to hold their bladders and not suffer discomfort. This will make millions. The possible side-effects are that you go humps just like a camel, but the convenience is worth it.

2) The "All Food Looks Gross" diet pill. Take one of these to the supermarket, and you won't buy junk food, because all food looks gross and makes you nauseous. Side effects might be that you will crave chalk and gnawing on wood or plastic, but at least it has less calories than junk food.

3) The Mood Multiplier Pill. Because of the social interactions of dating online, and living on Facebook and My Second Life, we will lose our capacity to genuinely feel emotions. Not to worry. Drop one of these babies and you will cry at funerals, think that your weird Uncle John is funny as hell, thoroughly enjoy visiting your aged parents in a nursing home, and actually look forward to leaving your computer screen to take out the accumulating garbage of empty pizza boxes and beer cans. This pill will be enhanced in potency and sold under the "My Life Doesn't Suck" label.

When I was first forced to read "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley in school, I thought that the part about having a "soma" a drug to make people happy was the biggest bunch of crap that I had ever heard, and wondered what Huxley was smoking when he wrote the book. As it turns out, he could accurately foresee the future of pharmaceuticals. And it didn't matter what recreational pharmaceutical that he was using, because ultimately he was spot on in his predictions.

Things That Need Inventing -- A Mood Ring IPOD

Back in the 1970's, the hottest thing to have was a mood ring. They changed colour depending on you moods. They were quite inexpensive as well. I don't know if they worked, but I remember once getting angry at someone and my mood ring turned black, so I was convinced.

As I was going through my morning routine this morning on the computer, I searched for some suitable music for my mood. Unfortunately, I don't quite know what my mood was this morning, and thus I was struck with the great Eureka moment once again. (Sometimes genius is a heavy load to carry).

What this world needs is a mood ring coupled to your iPOD. The mood ring figures the type of music that you need and the iPOD plays it accordingly. They say that music soothes the savage beast. I am told that the correct quote is that music soothes the savage breast. That too.

Anyhoo, with today's technology, this thing should be a snap. Instead of me racing to the patent office, I think that the folks at Apple (Paging Steve Jobs) should just include this in the next release and send me a big fat royalty cheque. I will watch my mailbox for this one. And my mood ring music would be playing:

If you want to see my other putative inventions and things that I consider worth inventing, please click HERE !

Things That Need Inventing -- Edible Fruit Marking System

Last night, I went to get a pear for my evening snack. I was enjoying it immensely until I realized that I was eating the annoying little sticker that one sees now on fruit. The episode derailed all of the enjoyment for me of eating the pear.

I thought that there has to be a better way. I thought of all sorts of other ways to mark fruit. I thought of laser etching, but it is too expensive and time consuming. I thought of edible rice paper stickers, but it might not be water proof. Then inspiration struck me. When meat is inspected, it is stamped with an ink made from the skins of red grapes.

Why not have a stamp for fruit with edible ink. It would be environmentally friendly, you could eat it, and it would eliminate all those annoying little stickers.

The other enhancement that I thought of was that the little stickers cannot be scanned at the supermarket checkout. With my system, the stamp could be a barcode that can be scanned as pictured below.

On top of all of that, you could dope the ink with vitamins or caffeine such that people would want to eat it. This is definitely something that needs inventing. I will race you to the patent office on this one.

To see my entire collection of things that need inventing, please click HERE.