Culture
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Background: In the ancient times of “video arcades,” progress in a game was partially limited by the number of quarters in a player’s pocket. Certain arcade games were often theoretically winnable by anyone, as long as that person was willing to spend $100+ on the attempt. The Issue: After home consoles killed the video arcade,…
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Background: One great idea for encouraging people to get exercise is the 2012 phone app “Zombies, Run!” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies,_Run). This program gauges the user’s jogging progress by monitoring their phone’s GPS location, and it periodically warns the user that a horde of virtual zombies is chasing them. This should motivate the jogger to temporarily speed up…
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Background: When learning a foreign language, it can be difficult to advance beyond the stage of extremely basic competency. Once a person can “kind of” use a language, it is rare that their communication attempts will be corrected by random strangers, so that person will end up saying things like “Here, there is pancakes served?…
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Background: One major concern for any civilization that lasts for more than a few billion years is: what is the best long-term method to reliably store and retrieve energy? Solar panels on a planet work great, but only capture a tiny fraction of total solar output. Some ideas exist for working around this (Figure 1),…
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Background: Many people find the relentless piling up of emails in their inbox to be stressful. There are various approaches for dealing with this. The most well-known is probably “inbox zero,” which recommends triaging emails when they’re relatively new (instead of procrastinating and letting them pile up). Although “inbox zero” doesn’t require that you should…
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The Issue: Dining venues often provide a “customer copy” of a receipt (Figure 1). However, in most cases these receipts are printed, taken to the diner’s table, and then immediately thrown away. Is there a solution to this wasteful misuse of paper? Proposal: The solution is simple: print the receipt on something edible, like a…
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The Issue: Art museums have their merits, but they are rarely described as “interactive.” For a large percentage of the population, visiting an art museum is suspiciously similar to just viewing a tour on YouTube or seeing the same works in a printed book. Proposal: There’s a way to make the art viewing experience more…
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The Issue: When a person is walking around a corner, there’s always a chance that they’ll unluckily collide with someone walking the opposite way (Figure 1). The fundamental problem is obvious enough: there’s just no way to see around the corner. Hospitals and parking garages frequently solve this issue by placing a big convex mirror…
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The Issue: Many movies feature a protagonist who the audience sympathizes with, despite the fact that in real life, that same audience might disapprove of such a person. There’s a lack of ethical consistency here. Why would a moviegoer root for an amoral assassin in a movie (e.g., in Day of the Jackal), yet support…
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The Issue: Washing machines and clothes dryers save an immense amount of time. But there’s still a significant bottleneck in the pipeline from “dryer” → “pile of clothes” → “dresser / closet”: specifically, the process of actually identifying each article of clothing (Figure 1). Before the pile of clothes can be sorted and put away, the clothes-washing individual will…
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