Zeroization

This humorous site, Patently Silly, offers perspectives on some of the more frivolou patents that have been granted. Some of them aren’t actually that silly, like this method for detecting pornographic images. I’ve read the research on it, it uses a probabalistic model of skin tones in an image to make the determination. Some of them are merely impractical, like this ergomonic notebook. Some are kind of stupid, like this apparatus which assists drinking and smoking in front of an audience.