Design
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Background: A “white noise generator” is device that plays a static sound that resembles what you’d hear as a passenger in a car on the highway. This sort of noise is often useful for people who sleep in environments where there is a constant low level of distracting sounds (e.g. frogs making noise, cars stopping…
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Background: Many people feel obligated to look “sufficiently presentable” when they go out of the house: this may involve non-wrinkled clothes, makeup, hair styling, etc. The Issue: Sometimes, people just want to go about their lives without worrying about fashion or oppressive standards of personal grooming and hygiene. One interesting approach to this is to…
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Background: From the perspective of a person on the Earth’s surface, the Moon is a more-or-less featureless white circle in the sky. Even with a telescope, what information can a layman glean? Perhaps “here are some craters, and some gray splotches, I guess?” The Issue: The Moon (Fig. 1) might as well be a blank…
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The Issue: Many laptops have ports on one or both sides: chargers, USB ports, a headphone jack, video out, etc. However, it’s often quite annoying to find the ports. People often forlornly scratch at the side of their laptop for several seconds while trying to attach a cable to an out-of-view port. The difficulty of…
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Background: Pointing with an outstretched index finger is a common gesture used by humans to direct another human’s attention. The Issue: Since pointing is so widespread, a human being pointed at will usually also recognize the gesture. Depending on the circumstances, pointing may be considered to be rude and accusative. For example, imagine that you…
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Background: Many workplaces provide coffee makers or espresso machines for their employees to use. The Issue: The process of setting up a drip coffee machine or making an espresso can take several minutes, during which the employee is not toiling productively. Even the single-use-coffee-“pod” machines (famously, the Nespresso brand) take at least a few seconds…
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Background: Computer speakers can play high-frequency sounds that a dog can hear, but a human cannot. (This will be important later.) The Issue: People often wish they spent less time casually browsing / “doom scrolling” on the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s a hard habit to break! Proposal: This solution is very simple: an operating system can…
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The Issue: Climbing tall mountains is inherently unsafe. Dangers include falling, high winds, frostbite, venomous snakes, attack by eagles, and the high altitude “DEATH ZONE,” which really makes the whole peak-conquering thing seem like a bad idea. Additionally, this high degree of danger makes it impractical for children, the elderly, and the handicapped to fully…
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Background: In some languages, there are several variants of words (like “this” or “that”) that give you additional “implicit” information about the world. For example, if a person says “this notebook,” it indicates a notebook that is near them. If they say “that notebook,” it indicates a more distantly-located notebook. Even though a language can…
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Background: Some animals communicate at frequencies outside of the normal range of human hearing. For example, bats are constantly flying around and emitting shrill echolocation “pings,” but humans typically can’t hear them. Proposal: Electronic hearing aids have existed for many years, but they’ve always focused on enhancing hearing in the normal human ranges—no one has…
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