Wednesday, June 4, 2008

The Wonderful World of Patents


For those who don't know, I work in a patent firm. Surrounded by quirky lawyers following an extremely linear and boring process of bringing patents to grant, I've processed a lot of patents in my short time here. Every so often I stumble across a particularly bizarre or oddly worded patent description that I just have to jot down. Today I've decided to share some of these with you. Ladies and gentlemen, here are a few of the things you could have invented and made your millions on:

"Processing architecture having passive threads and active semaphores"

Huh?? Perhaps the inventor liked using those semaphore flags!

"Carry-skip adder having merged carry-skip cells with sum cells"

Try saying that ten times fast, er... skipper.

"Nodma Cache"

Duuude, I just got this cache of some killer nodma, wanna come over and smoke some with me?

"Detecting Virtualization"

This is one of my faves, just how is a gerund and an intangible concept a patent? This is like saying "Seeking Amalgamation" - I just don't see how this is anything tangible.

"Wound capicator with ball-and-lead configuration"

Someone must have been spending too much time at the Tokien convention, isn't this just a mace?

And finally, what inspired me to write this post, my work partner came across this one yesterday:

"Method of making a condom by blow extrusion"

Sweeeet!!

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