5. Chasin' Paypahs

So, I've recently found myself reading a lot of technical papers on Arxiv.org dealing with whatever subject that I'm fleetingly interested in at the time. As I currently have an office job, I am able to read intermittently throughout the day. However, if I haven't finished an article by the time I've finished the work day, I either have to put the pdf on my tiny mobile screen or plan ahead and print the entire article out over the course of the day. Even with a laser printer printing on both sides of the sheets, printing an article that's a few hundred pages takes quite some time.

Thus, I began searching for alternatives. Kindle-style readers are available with pdf compatibility, however the cheapest ones still top $250-300. While it's not exactly breaking the bank, paper still remains cheaper.

Today I found myself in the all-too-familiar predicament of wanting to discretely print out an article to read on my 2 hour train commute home, when I had an idea. What if I could somehow print all the sheets to one piece of paper? Sure, it may take some time getting the data from the computer to the printer, but the time-consuming mechanical process of feeding the sheets in and applying the toner would be taken out of the picture.

The idea I have is based on the party game "Outburst." The popular game had cards with a series of words that the clue-giver had to get people to guess. To avoid cheating, the cards were patterned such that they could only be read after they were placed inside of a "filter" container. It was basically like a giant version of those red and blue 3d glasses - a red plastic-wrap style filter would get rid of all the red camouflage, revealing the bluer words.

Expanding upon that idea, I would like to design an adjustable filter that would allow a user to insert their sheet of jumbled letters and reveal just one page of a book at a time. To accomplish this, each sheet would be either printed in a slightly different color (impractical), or would be broken up such that either rotating or sliding the high-resolution striated filter would reveal another sheet (more practical). This would have the ability to be applied to almost any printer. And as far as being efficient, at worst it would use the same amount of ink as printing all the sheets while using less pieces of paper.