The Scalzer or Tweepel

Ow! Now that's just annoying.

Having picked up another annoying skelf (splinter) in my finger at the weekend, what I really need to dig it out is a cross between a pair of tweezers and a scalpel. So I hereby invent the Tweepel. Unless it already exists, but a quick Google didn’t throw anything up.

So the problem is I can see the end of the skelf just below the skin, normally I’d hack away at it with the end of a needle until there’s enough sticking out to grab with a blunt pair of tweezers.

What I really need is the Tweepel.

Tweepel

Imagine a fine pair of tweezers, but the ends are small scalpel blades. Now I can slice through the out layers of my epidermis and then grab the end of the splinter in one easy action. What could go wrong!

Things I must flesh out

Temporary electric four wheel drive for cars. It would only be to get you going in difficult conditions, eg snow, mud. The basic idea would be to have electric motors on the normally free spinning wheels, they would only need to work at low speed just to get the car moving. [July 2011]

Multiple armatures on hard disks. To improve at least read performance, perhaps write if the logic could be figured out. So one spindle, multiple arms (not just heads/platters). This is probably something that was done in the early days of computing.

Update 11/5/2012
Looks like I was right. Conner Patent, Tom’s Hardware article

Update 22/9/2014
And again, the new Volvo XC90, will have the front wheels driven by conventional engine, and rear wheels by electric motor.

Snooker ball spots

Just been watching a bit of the snooker between Trump and Higgins. Hazel Irvine and co. were discussing the amount of spin being put on the cue ball by using a cue ball with spots. She asked Steve Davis (I think) why couldn’t they play tournaments with a spotted cue ball. He said they do in some pool competitions, but the governing body for snooker has said “no”.

Anyway, so I thought of a possible solution, could the spots on the ball be invisible to the naked eye, but detectable by the TV cameras? Perhaps there could be infra-red reflective (or absorbent) spots on the cue ball, and the TV cameras could pick them up.