Idea of the day 7.20.08

All my life I've had 'bright' ideas. (I've had plenty of dumb ones, too—ask anyone in my family. Like my 'shortcuts' which almost always resulted in getting lost and arriving late.) Often these flashes of brilliance come late in the evening or even in the middle of the night. And often, if I can remember them the next day, some or most or all of the luster is gone and I toss them away and wait for the next one to strike.

Some of my 'bright' ideas are in fact legitimate, but usually they've already been invented and patented. I said for years that home battery-powered smoke alarms should be able to wirelessly trigger each other in case of a fire. Then one day I did a patent search (uspto.gov) and found that someone had this idea long before me. Oh well. At least they're finally on the market (and in our house, too).

So here are a couple of ideas from yesterday:

I've never driven a Prius or even sat in one, but I understand they have a display which shows gas consumption. I was thinking about meters which show consumption recently, and it occurred to me that a display that showed cost would certainly get my attention. If I filled the tank and then entered that day's cost per gallon, a 'smart' display could then behave like a taxi cab meter showing miles per dollar (or dollars per mile, depending on the vehicle).

A similar display for electricity would also graphically tell us the cost of baking the turkey, running the big screen TV, etc., not in kilowatts, but in $$$$$.

And here's a fanciful one: A bad odor is added to natural gas so it's easy to smell a gas leak, thereby making something invisible easier to detect. What if we could temporarily—for a week, say— add a dye to carbon dioxide emissions from vehicle exhausts, factories, power plants, etc. so that we could see how much of this invisible gas our activities pour into the atmosphere? I think a pastel color would be pretty...