Plus: Record-Breaking Pi Calculations, Translating Thoughts into Speech, P&G’s Open Innovation Network and the World’s Most Useless Machine.

Dumb Products of the Past Decade
The last 10 years provided us with countless examples of innovation and breakthroughs in product development, but not every product was a winner. In fact, some inventions were so disappointing, whether in concept or implementation, that they’ll someday serve as artifacts of the mistakes made in the 2000-2009 era.

Highlights (or, more accurately, lowlights) from Inc.com’s recent roundup of the most misconceived products of the decade include:

• The CueCat, a cat-shaped barcode reader that allowed users to go to a company’s URL link;
• Over-the-top burgers, like those featuring two doughnuts instead of buns or a foie gras coating that tops out at $175;
• Nail beds, which became a big hit in Sweden in 2009 despite there being no evidence of health benefits to sleeping on them;
• Big Mouth Billy Bass, which, though fleetingly amusing, is today likelier to adorn a garage sale or a landfill than someone’s wall; and
• A golf club-shaped urinal for relieving oneself on the course. Need we say more?

According to Inc.com, the dumbest creations of the past 10 years were characterized by their inconvenience, excessiveness or downright tackiness.

World-Record Pi Calculation
A French computer scientist this week announced that he has broken the world record for calculating the numbers in pi, reaching 2.7 trillion digits in a project that took 131 days and surpassed the previous record by 123 billion digits.

Perhaps most surprising about record-breaker Fabrice Bellard‘s feat is that he accomplished his calculations on a desktop computer, while previous records were achieved through the use of supercomputers. According to BBC News, reciting Bellard’s calculation at a rate of one digit per second would take 85,000 years.

Bellard tackled the project not out of any particular interest in pi, but to test methods of “arbitrary-precision arithmetic,” a branch of mathematics which, according to Bellard’s paper on pi calculations via desktop computer, “allows computations on numbers in the terabyte range with inexpensive hardware resources.”

Scientists Translate Brain Waves into Speech
A team of scientists recently designed and successfully tested a system that converts brain waves into audible speech, Discovery News reports. The development raises the possibility of enabling people left mute by stroke, Lou Gehrig’s disease and other afflictions to one day communicate by synthetic voice.

Researchers implanted a small electrode inside a paralyzed but fully cognitive subject’s brain, then waited several months for nerve cells to grow into the electrode and create detectable signals. The electrode converted these signals into radio waves that were routed into a decoding system and processed by a speech synthesizing program on a home computer.

It took roughly 50 milliseconds for the thought to be translated into speech, approximately the same length of time as in naturally occurring speech. According to a paper on the findings, the researchers hope these “neural prostheses” can be used to assist people with severely impaired speech or motor skills.

“The most significant thing is that this shows it would be possible for someone who is paralyzed to speak in real-time rather than going through a painful typing process,” lead researcher Frank Guenther, from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, told Discovery News. “This communication is very important because these people are completely locked out from the rest of the world.”

Reaching Out for New Ideas — for Better or Worse
Consumer products giant Procter and Gamble Co. has adopted an interesting solution to innovative product development: cast as wide a net as possible by listening to pretty much every idea.

Since opening its doors in 2001 to proposals from inventors, companies and even other businesses, about half of P&G’s new products have relied on concepts, ingredients or technology from outside sources, the New York Times reports. The Swiffer line of cleaning products, developed by a Japanese company, is one of the major successes that emerged from this strategy.

Not all of the ideas were winners, though. Some of the weirder contributions rejected by the firm included placing dusting pads on a cat’s paws to help clean the house, a belly-button lint brush, a home embalming kit and a “Knees and Toes” body wash counterpart to Head and Shoulders shampoo.

“We don’t care where good ideas come from, as long as they come to us,” Jeff Weedman, a vice president at P&G, told the New York Times. ”We’re not going to use everything that shows up, but we want to be the preferred partner.”

For more on tapping into consumers’ ideas for innovative concepts, see Harnessing Collective Innovation.

World’s Most Useless Machine
While we hoped to enter the new year with need-to-know trends and tips, we’re starting 2010 with a completely unnecessary device. Do-it-yourself Web site Instructables.com offers a guide to building a machine that turns itself off. Of course, it’s not completely useless, as this self-defeating apparatus does provide a good few seconds of amusement:

Have a great weekend, folks.