June 2010 Archives

A final year student at the Dublin Institute of Technology has made a major technical breakthrough in tractor safety. James O Meara, a final year Manufacturing and Design Engineering student, won the Innovative Student Engineer 2010 (Level 8) award sponsored by Siemens and Engineers Ireland for his project. Details are available at http://www.dit.ie/news/archive2010/studentengineer/

Imagine a ball pen that would remember what it writes, whether sketches or hundreds of pages of text. When I thought of it in May of 2008 I did not know that such a device had already been invented, but realised that most of the elements that would comprise the invention were already there in existing technology. I subsequently learned that a very similar device to what I had in mind had been invented and was being commercialized. This was the EPOS-enabled Digital Pen and USB Flash Drive from Advanced Digital Positioning Technologies (http://www.epos-ps.com).

Unaware of the existence of a comparable device, such as the EPOS-enabled Digital Pen, I thought there must be many ways that the device I had in mind could be realized. To narrow the options, I decided to let the ball be light-permeable. The technical name of the device could be ‘an optical ball pen stylus’. The marketing people might come up with a trendier name like a Stilly: a silly stylus with memory. The descriptions below are my original ideas and are not identical to those implemented in the commercial device.

I saw on TV this evening that BP is now setting about fitting a hose onto the leaking oil well. This slip-on hose arrangement is referred to as a lower marine riser package cap (LMRP); see information available at http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/RNGS/2010/MAY/PIPE.jpg. My intuition is that my own suggestion of plugging the riser with a self-weighted taper that could then be locked down (http://www.fun-engineering.net/blogs/funeng/2010/05/how-to-plug-a-leaking-oil-well-in-deep-water.html) would be a more satisfactory and safer arrangement. From what was described on TV, I thought the well riser had been intentionally severed just below the leaking blow-out preventer, but from the aforementioned graphical information at thomsonreuters.com it seems that this is not the case. If it were, then right now the well would be dischaging at full free-flow.