Personal Document Incinerator

Sometimes ideas come from the fertile minds of other people. This week's idea is thanks to Brad F. Brad was thinking about a different (and perhaps better) way to get rid of your documents with sensitive information on them. Oh, sure, you could use a shredder - but how about a personal incinerator. This small unit would be a high-efficiency incinerator, that would instantly vaporize your unwanted paper. You could even recover the heat generated, either by hooking it up to your water heater or you could just heat the room air (only useful in the winter).

There you have it: complete destruction of paper documents; energy recovery; no shredded paper to dispose of. Sounds like a win-win-win. Thanks Brad.

Dynamic Traffic Monitoring

I have to say, I'm enjoying the light traffic, now that the summer has begun. Unfortunately, it has to get congested again in the fall. Or does it? I think most will agree that some fine-tuning of our highway system is always needed. How is this best done?

I'm sure the highway engineers are working hard on the problem, but let me suggest a couple of ideas:

1) Talk to the people who regularly travel certain routes. They will probably have a few good ideas (mixed in with the complaints). For example, when I drive south on Route 3 in Massachusetts, coming from the NH border. I notice that it always clogs up at the Route 495 interchange. The problem seems to be all the lanes merging after you pass 495. My suggestion? leave one or two of the lanes there for longer. I notice that the traffic doesn't start to ease until you get to the Treble Cove exit. So, keep an additional lane or tow until that exit. Enough people are getting off at each of the exits south of 495 that the traffic will allow a narrowing of the road. Take a look. (Sorry for those of you who don't live in NH or MA).

2) This brings me to another idea. How do you find the bottlenecks? How about using the EasyPass transponders in many of the cars. (For those who don't yet know, this is an electronic toll-collection device, a radio device that will inform the toll booth that you have just passed through). What if you track the movement of cars with this transponder to see where the traffic moves fast or slow. You would have a real-time view of traffic flow.

I know what some of you are saying: "What about privacy?" "What about the government using this for catching speeders?" They could be doing that now, but they're not. You could safeguard the data by assigning a tracking number to each car entering the monitored zone, and only recording this random tracking number. The actual transponder number would not be remembered once the car exits the monitoring zone. (If you are still uncomfortable with this, just put the transponder in the special bag it comes in, and it will be shielded.) Think about it - you already have hundreds (perhaps thousands) of cars driving alone the highways with these transponders. Let's put them to work providing data so we can make improvements to the road.