Put your trivial knowledge to work making $$$

[Jaboney]

I'm willing to bet that someone on f.com could make a few bucks this way rather than whittling away the hours making bad puns.

John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea.

The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive, a company that links organizations (seekers) with problems (challenges) to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for resolving them. The company gets a posting fee and, if the problem is solved, a “finders fee” equal to about 40 percent of the prize.

The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, reflects “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating” enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code, or original programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.

The approach is catching on. Today, would-be innovators can sign up online to compete for prizes for feats as diverse as landing on the Moon (space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge) and inventing artificial meat (www.peta.org/feat_in_vitro_contest.asp).

This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest problems of biology — how proteins fold (fold.it).

[urodacus]

i thought you were inviting me to the animals taiwan trivia night at Carnegie's.

sheesh. and there was some guy who invented sideways oil drilling to extend the range of ocean oil rigs by watching his son finish a milkshake with a bendy straw. I saw that on TV.

[Belgian Pie]

I tried that while drilling a hole in my wall ... drill broke ...

[sandman]

I've often thought about patenting my own personal invention. It's a pill, about the size of a common-or-garden aspirin tablet, and you simply drop it into your petrol tank. It has this patented chemical reaction when it comes in contact with everyday tapwater that turns the liquid into vehicle fuel that has absolutely zero emissions and is therefore entirely pollution-free.
I'm still working out the details, but I bet you wouldn't even need to use tapwater -- if you were by a lake, say, you could just pop some lake water in there and it would work. Or seawater. Saliva, even, but you'd probably need quite a lot of people to help you in that case, unless I can refine the process to make one cc of water = to about a gallon of petrol. It can be done, I'm sure of it.
How much do I win?

[Dr. McCoy]

This South American body of water was named after breasts and excrement.

[sandman]

This South American body of water was named after breasts and excrement.

WRONG! Only one breast. Give me the money.

[Dr. McCoy]

Please answer in the form of a question.

[sandman]

Why haven't you given me the money yet?

[Dr. McCoy]

I'm sorry, the correct answer is 'What is Lake Titicaca?'
So, Burt Reynolds, it's still unfortunately your board.

[irishstu]

Like Sandman, I've invented a pill, but this one is a type of male contraceptive. The best thing about it is that it has no side effects. You just put it in your shoe and it makes you limp.