Imagine coming home from work and finding the day’s stock market graphs neatly reflected in the order of the books on your bookshelves. If stocks have climbed during the day, you will see that the small paperback novels are on the left, gradually increasing in size and ending with The Encyclopedia Of Pastries (the tallest book) on the right, so that the books’ heights form an increasing profile.

However, if stocks have peaked in mid morning and declined afterwards, the Encyclopedia Of Pastries will be towards the left and smaller and smaller books will appear after it, ending with “The Pocket Guide To Halfbakery Fonts”.

This mechanized attachment for your bookshelves will continuously rearrange the books according to whatever real-time indexes and time duration you specify. Each individual shelf can be set to mirror a different statistic, for example, the Dow Jones index, price of gold, or the interest rate of your choosing.

All you have to do is load your books into the slots, one book per slot. The machine accommodates books of various thicknesses. It is recommended that you stock each shelf with a variety of short and tall books, so that the chart can be built as accurately as possible. However, the computer will work with whatever sizes you give it in order to best approximate the day’s patterns using the books available.

Thank you.
-- phundug, Apr 07 2010

[+] but you could arrange it that the books which correspond to your stocks are arranged on top shelves if they're climbing and bottom shelves if they're diving.
-- FlyingToaster, Apr 07 2010


I have always thought that organising books by colour is the best system. Perhaps this idea could incorporate this, so that books of a similar colour are marshalled onto one shelf, to represent one stock?

Presumably the scale would be something like 1cm per half hour, so the machine would have complex algorithms to watch the heights of available books (in an 'unsorted' shelf behind perhaps?), and then make it grab a book whose height and thickness are both appropriate?
-- pocmloc, Apr 07 2010


I like the idea of a buffer section which can hold various sized books so that an appropriate size is always available.

For the time frame, you can choose daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, depending on how often you want it to update.
-- phundug, Apr 07 2010



random, halfbakery