Design
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Background: Voice recognition has existed in somewhat passable form since the late 1990s. But recently it has become more prominent with Apple Siri, the “OK Google” voice assistant, and Amazon Alexa. The issue: However, these products are all incredibly limited, and can perform almost no actions beyond a few hard-coded ones that were added at…
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Background: Sometimes, when driving through a residential neighborhood road, you may encounter annoying speed bumps, speed humps, or speed lumps (Figure 1). The issue: These speed bumps / lumps discourage you from taking the shortcut (Figure 2). But you’re important, and have places to be! If only there were some way you could take these…
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Background: When packing a box for shipping, some objects can stack perfectly with no wasted space. However, some common shapes—for example, cylinders (e.g. toilet paper rolls) and spheres (e.g. oranges)—can’t be packed without wasted empty space in the box (Figure 1). Proposal: If someone orders a set of products that don’t pack together,…
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Background: Certain types of vending machines are capable of squeezing oranges and dispensing the freshly-squeezed orange juice right there at the machine. Generally speaking, these machines actually show you the oranges through a transparent window, so you can see the orange-juice-making process. Most of these machines proclaim that you are getting “100% Orange Juice” or…
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Background: Running a business is expensive, and employee wages are usually a huge fraction of total costs (see Figure 1). However, these jobs can’t always be eliminated: many jobs still REQUIRE a human employee, and jobs that require an on-site presence can’t be outsourced. Proposal: Some jobs require an on-site presence and are difficult to…
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Background: When giving a presentation on a large screen, there are two popular options for calling attention to specific areas of a slide deck: Physically gesture at the screen (or use a laser pointer, as seen in Figure 1). Use the laptop trackpad to move the mouse pointer / arrow around. The issue: The trackpad…
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The issue: During a conference call, it can be difficult to position multiple people in such a way that everyone is actually in-frame. Usually, either: Only one person fits into the frame, or: Everyone is extremely far from the camera, so 95% of the screen area is taken up by a conference table. Figure 1…
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Background: People occasionally forget to lock the door before leaving the house, or leave a stove on by accident, or any number of other things. “Internet of Things” aficionados often suggest that you could, say, turn on and off your stove from your phone, but now someone on the Internet thousands of miles away can…
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Background: Some new phones (and laptops) have the ability to detect an authorized user’s face and unlock the phone without requiring a PIN. Often, if you have something stuck in your teeth, people won’t say anything. Then, hours later, you realize that you had, say, a huge leaf of lettuce in your hair the whole…
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Erase all of written history to hide our shameful alphabet-based mistakes from the future! After reading this, you will think Fahrenheit 451 is an instruction manual.
also that X-is-an-instruction-manual is already a joke about 1984, ambiguity, ambiguous letters, Celcius 233, Centipede 233, Centrigrade 233, erase the mistakes of the past, Fahrenheit 451, fix Latin letters, fix the English language, letters, never learn from the past, that one movie Equilibrium I guess
The issue: Latin-based writing systems—like the one your’e reading right now—have a serious problem: many letters and numbers look exactly the same! The most obvious example (Figure 1) is probably “l” (lower-case “L”) and “I” (upper-case “i”). Benefits: Fixing these duplicated symbols, perhaps with the proposed new symbols in Figure 3, has a number of…
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