Bus stopping

Sometimes it takes just one person to stop a bus. One person!

It would be nice if you could set up a system whereby the passengers on the bus could offer the person at the stop a small amount of cash not to catch the bus but to wait for the next one. If the person accepted the offer, the bus moves on and everyone is happy.

So for example, 50 people on the one bus could individually decide to offer an average of 50c each for the person to waive their right to wave the bus down. The person at the bus stop would thus receive $25 if they accepted the offer. If there’s more than say three people waiting, then the bus stops for them and there’s no deal. If one person wants to catch the bus and the other two don’t, then the bus stops and there’s no deal. But if all three want to share the spoils of the bus that passes them by, then the bus moves on, the passengers are sped happily on their way and those waiting are rewarded for their patience.

You’d have to work out a way to administer the system without too much fuss. I reckon you could just about do this now using existing technology. Mobile phones and Paypal could make it work, with a dedicated website for bidding on buses on your route, or accepting the offer that the potentially passing bus was making. You would have no trouble at all finding advertisers to pay set-up costs for such a system—a captive audience, glued to their mobile phones waiting to see if their bid was effective.

The bus itself would have to be enabled for wireless internet so that the people staffing the website could communicate quickly with the driver. But we already have security cameras on buses recording our every move and sending it back to base; how much harder would it be to get the internet thing happening? Wireless internet on public transport is long overdue anyway. It would add another layer of effectiveness to peoples' laptop-assisted morning commute. It would actually make commuting attractive for any desk-worker who needed an internet connection, because your work day would start (as mine does) the moment you set foot on the bus and open up your laptop, and would count towards your hours.

Homeless people might take advantage of this bidding system by forming consortiums to put single individuals at rarely frequented bus-stops, like the one two stops up from our house. But that’s OK isn’t it? Much less threatening than being approached by beggars in the street, and it helps the poor.

Remember when it all happens… you heard it here first!

Another invention—Scrabulous Plus

Scrabulous is a great game for socializing, but once you have more than two players it doesn't work.

One of the problems is that it lasts too long, because you wait interminably for someone to make their move. I don't know how to solve that.

The other problem is that it doesn't last long enough. It finally gets around to your turn again, and already 58 tiles have been laid, 3 bingoes are down, and you've lost no matter what.

The solution to that is to make the board three squares wider right around the perimeter, and then to issue another 30, maybe 40 letter tiles in proportion to the tile distribution that exists in the current Scrabulous.

I call it Scrabulous Plus, you heard it here first, I'm not actually going to follow through with it but when you see it happen, you know that I thought of it right here, right now, and before anyone else.

Believe it...or not!

Implanted iPhone

Timothy didn't like my implanted iPhone idea at all. But in a few years time this will be much less invasive than a hip replacement, fillings, surgery to correct eyesight or a pacemaker, and we all accept these things as being anything from useful through to necessary.

In fact, check out this artificial heart. For some reason I especially like the bit in that linked article that says "In this article, you will get an in-depth look at how this new artificial heart works, how it's implanted into a patient's chest and who might be a candidate for receiving one of these mechanical hearts. We will also compare the AbioCor heart to the artificial hearts that have failed in the past."

If you had to get one of those suckers, or pumpers, you might as well get the scaled down wireless iPhone equivalent of 5 years from now implanted along with it.

In a short while I would say that my iPhone implant idea will be able to be powered by a person's body movement.