Readers of the new book "SuperFreakonomics" will get the inside word on ideas including the hurricane-suppression concept dreamed up by Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures, with help from Bill Gates and others. When TechFlash broke the news of the hurricane project over the summer, we included a quote from a University of Miami professor who was highly skeptical that the "kooky" plan would work.

But Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer, told us in a recent interview that critics are overlooking a critical element of the plan. The system wouldn't be deployed immediately before a hurricane, he explained. Instead, the devices would be out there for months, mixing the sea by sinking warm surface water to deeper levels -- thereby keeping the temperature below levels that feed hurricanes.

Nathan Myhrvold

"You do this early in the season," Myhrvold said. "A bunch of people were interviewed with the fundamental misapprehension that we were going to put these things out there, like, the day before the storm, and somehow that was going to stop them. Not the case. The idea is to put them out there in January, and they sit there all year, mixing the sea just a little more than the sea would otherwise be mixed."

Intellectual Ventures has released the video above to demonstrate the concept, which it calls the Salter Sink, based on its origins in the ideas of engineer Stephen Salter. It was also highlighted in a recent segment on ABC's 20/20.

The company has also created a miniature demonstration in a tank, using dye that shows one of the devices sinking the surface water to the bottom. Intellectual Ventures notes on its blog that it isn't building such a system at full scale, or planning to, but it hopes to interest scientists in the concept.

The hurricane-supression system is one of two Intellectual Ventures projects featured in SuperFreakonomics. The other concept, dubbed Stratoshield, which would pump liquid sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to shade critical areas of the Earth from the sun just enough to reverse or reduce the effects of global warming. See our earlier post for details and a video of Myhrvold explaining that project.

"SuperFreakonomics" co-author Steven Levitt is set to be on the "Daily Show" tonight, and it should be interesting to see if either of the Intellectual Ventures projects come up in the discussion with Jon Stewart.