Paul Klinkman’s inventions page
Here’s what I wish to bring to fruition:
An Orbiting Atmospheric Gatherer
News flash: Our team just won a Kalenian Award Honorable Mention.
Starting in November of 2005 I began going back to my alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I started working with a project team weekly in September of 2006, and then a larger project team in the 2007-2008 school year. WPI needs good projects for its students. I talked to one group about gathering gases in orbit, and also helped a lunar agriculture project team. As of Saturday, February 3, 2007, we went public at the 2007 IASTS conference with our orbiting atmospheric gatherer and lunar agriculture innovations.
The orbiting gas gatherer is now a full utility patent application with 34 claims. The patent examiner won't like me, but I needed each and every claim.
Hydrogen on the Moon
If you think there's no hydrogen on the moon, you're not quite correct. It's just hard for you to collect. The lunar regolith gatherer very cheaply collects hydrogen by heating iron hydride, and it cheaply collects oxygen. Patents are in process. I've been quite busy with patent work.
A Greenhouse
My greenhouse utility patents are in process as of June 19, 2008. My greenhouse loses 80% less heat at night than a normal greenhouse, which means it doesn't use any heating fuel on this side of Alaska. We can grow hot weather crops such as tomatoes. I hope to post details at www.KlinkmanSolar.com soon.
I want a democratic government that is honest.
A democratic government is something that human beings invented. Benjamin Franklin was an inventor and he invented the 18th century's best government by far.. If we don't invent any good government, by default we get corruption or a dictatorship. If we don't tinker with our government to make it better, by default we get the same old corruption again and again until we bequeath the corruption to our grandchildren.
A good government is fair and honest, in a world of occasionally dishonest people. It is designed to be resistant to political campaign cash, should operate in a cost-efficient manner and should reflect the popular will. Here are some working corruption-resistant democratic models:
a. Cambridge,
Massachusetts-style choice proportional representation seems to successfully fight
political candidate corruption. I name
Choice voting murders political candidate corruption. The current contribution system inherently feeds corruption, despite our parade of innefectual campaign cash reforms. When will the voters wise up? Choice works and "reform" doesn't.
In previous generations the political machines spent lavish sums on repeal initiative after repeal initiative until they got rid of PR in their cities. Only Cambridge survived the onslaught. In fact, Cambridge has survived five repeal attempts. Also, racists hated PR in the 1940s because it gave some minor power to black city council members, as opposed to the white people holding all the power forever. Now that most of our big cities have multicultural power sharing, that racial exclusion attitude may have changed. Check out the web writings of Dr. Douglas Amy on this subject. Finally, anticommunists in the 1950s would give anything to hold all democratic power forever away from the communists, or from any pinko or Eisenhower Republican who could be painted as a communist.
We can slowly spread the idea of "Choice" Proportional Representation through thousands of college student councils, union locals, small co-op or corporate boards of directors and city councils, until the idea has widespread acceptance. You and two friends can win a small victory in your corner of the world. Try it! Then some of your local voters won't be so afraid of the new idea. After flipping a few city councils we change a couple of state legislatures, then continue on up toward Congress.
Caution: "Choice" Proportional Representation is not the same as voting for a party slate, as is done in national elections in countries such as Britain.
b. Suppose we
solved a difficult political issue by randomly picking twelve anonymous
citizens and paying them to come to a wise solution? We call this the jury system. In
c. Consensus process is used when we need great wisdom. However, in terms of people-hours it isn’t cheap. Trial juries use consensus.
d. Let’s implement an online government, just a few of us, over trifling issues at first. We can review the effectiveness of various home cleaning remedies to start, and move on to review consumer products. Let’s study what governmental ideas work online and what we still have to fix, starting from the above examples of honest government. Let’s prove a prototype of a better government that works. Don’t you want to leave the dream of a better world for your descendents? Then let’s start writing some code and imagining the dream.
The Fog Pond
My Solar Fog Pond is an appropriate technology solution to world desertification. It irrigates deserts and creates a fresh water supply from salt or brackish water. The Fog Pond uses mostly locally available materials.
You thought that I wouldn’t tell you any inventing details on this web page? I decided to make my Fog Pond a public invention.
Any pond in a desert covered with heavy oils (sorry, but most locally produced vegetable and nut oils will evaporate too quickly) will heat up during the day. Oil prevents evaporation. Multiple levels of brine in the pond will help even more to capture heat, according to one Israeli researcher..
At night, the temperature in almost any desert drops to freezing. If the oil on the pond is skimmed off, the warm-hot water will meet the cold air. Great billows of fog will form on the pond’s surface and will be blown downwind to the edge of the pond. A fog collecting net will capture some of the fog, and this fresh water can be channeled into a fresh water storage area. The rest of the fog will blow over and around the fog net onto the cropland/desert beyond.
It doesn’t take much fog to grow food crops if the moisture arrives every night without fail. The tallest tree on earth, the Coast Redwood, lives on almost nothing but fog all summer.
A series of long, thin ponds will act synergistically, watering the cropland in between ponds every night no matter which way the wind blows. Beyond the cropland, grasses will take root and live off of residual night fog. Large green areas will experience enhanced natural rainfall.
Remember that the
I want inventors to be paid
Do you want your country to be great? Do you want a great life? Support your inventors. As you can see, I’m not afraid to tackle government corruption, overpopulation and the greenhouse effect. I suspect that you never dreamed of having answers to any of these problems.
Do you want your country to drown in debt until you bow to your new masters? Starve your inventors. Right now Congress is pretty much making the stupid choice. Even worse, Congress is actually considering changing the patent laws from "whoever comes up with an idea first, gets the patent" to "whoever claims the idea first, gets the patent". This could legalize industrial espionage. Imagine John Gotti getting a patent on a new defibrillator!
A good invention could cost thousands of dollars to patent, with no guarantee that the inventor will ever see a dollar. That’s why most inventors make zero.
Inventors don’t need millions of dollars, but they need to live indoors and they need food.
First, I propose that the patent process be equivalent in cost and in complexity to the copyright laws. If a person invents and publishes something, legally it becomes his or her patented device by definition and without filing expensive government papers. This change in the law will keep people like myself from sitting on trillion dollar inventions for thirty years straight, or from taking the ideas to the grave.
Second, I propose that an impartial government board reward thousands of first-time inventors (and not huge corporations) that come up with profitable if not lucrative inventions. Then the government gives corporations a chance to bring the inventions to market, with royalties for the inventors. We’re a free market society, so if we pay inventors we’ll get more of them. If we starve inventors we get less of them.
Finally, we need an inventor's cooperative society. Invention, by rights, is a cooperative activity. Members must be bound (financially, possibly by sweat equity) to secrecy, and membership within any certain field of invention will be compartmentalized to further reduce secrecy violations. Members will be paid for their partial ideas, and even for good efforts on unsuccessful projects.