Literature
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Background: A book always has an obvious indicator of how far along you are in the story. With a physical book, you can see the remaining pages, while e-book readers display a difficult-to-avoid indicator like “232 pages (67%) remaining.” The Issue: The problem here is that the number of remaining pages conveys a lot of…
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Background: The English language has 26 letters. You are reading them right now! The Issue: Some of the letters of the alphabet are very poorly named. For example, “W” is pronounced “double-yoo,” which totally lacks the actual “w” sound (e.g. the leading sound in “what”) anywhere in it. Additionally, it’s absurd that the letter W…
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Background: When reading the news, people should ideally form opinions of the events in question based on the actual merits being reported. However, a frequent approach is: “Is this something that my nation or my political party did? Then I’m sure it’s good.” The Issue: Although this is undeniably often a successful heuristic (e.g. “cannibal…
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Background: When specifying a time, some positions may have either one or two digits (e.g. “1 PM” vs “11 PM”), but other positions always have a leading zero, no matter what (e.g. “1:01” and “1:11” both have three digits). Proposal: The inconsistency in digits is unnecessary and leads to weird sorting behavior. For example, if…
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The Issue: It can be difficult to get motivated to read a textbook or dry historical tome. It’s much easier to read an action-filled story that features murder and intrigue! Proposal: In order to motivate a person to read a boring textbook, we will create a new kind of “hybrid” book: instead of printing a…
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Background: Two obvious qualities that contribute to making an alphabet “good”: It’s quick to write. The letters can be distinguished unambiguously. (Information density might also be worth considering—we don’t want the letters to take up too much space—but we’ll be ignoring it here.) Sometimes, speed-of-writing and ease-of-reading is a tradeoff: consider the shorthand shown in…
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Background: In some video games, there is a difficulty setting referred to as “ironman,” in which a player only has one life—if they die, they must replay the ENTIRE game over again. (This is also the default setting in the “roguelike” game genre.) Proposal: In books, unfortunately there is no equivalent to this “ironman” mode—until…
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The issue: It’s often hard to get motivated to read a famous work of literature, especially when there are so many other forms of entertainment competing for one’s attention. Proposal: Let’s create a situation so that a person can read a book as a “bonus” along with a primary activity that they were already doing. (Ideally,…
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Background: Occasionally, people get a gift or memento from a company after working there for a certain period of time, or, sometimes, when their jobs are outsourced to a much cheaper country and everyone is fired. Proposal: For programmers, what better way to commemorate their contributions to a company than a log of all their…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 