Culture
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Background: Cars, trucks, motorcycles, and bicycles all share the roadways.However, drivers often entirely fail to notice bicyclists and motorcyclists. One study even suggests that drivers may often literally tune them out entirely: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+drivers+don%27t+notice+bicycles+study. For this particular idea, let’s focus on motorcycles, although the same general principle will also apply to bicycles. The Issue: At night,…
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Background: When the weather is cold, it’s often unappealing to wake up and get out of bed (Figure 1) to start your day. Proposal: The proposal is simple: a person needs something to look forward to when getting out of bed. This is essentially a “waystation” or “halfway point” of waking up. A person can…
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Background: The current “casual” style of watching movies at home is very convenient, but lacks much of the impressive and ostentatious style of films in the golden age of cinema. Typically, the “film watching” experience is as follows: 1) turn on TV (Figure 1), 2) press “play” on a remote. Proposal: Let’s bring back classic…
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Background: Modern technology is often extremely convenient. For example, in a house with some type of central heating, you can heat the entire house by just pushing a couple of buttons on a thermostat (Fig. 1). The Issue: However, this system might just be too easy and convenient: there’s no sense of accomplishment in pressing…
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Background: It is not always easy to interpret the emotional state of another person. For example, a person might not realize that their coworker is extremely annoyed or unusually morse. This can lead to misunderstandings and hard feelings that could have been avoided if it were somehow unambiguously obvious what a person’s emotional state is.…
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Background: Home ownership is frequently promoted as a “can’t lose” investment that always increases in value. The Issue: Unfortunately, it’s difficult—some might even say mathematically impossible—for housing to always increase in value, which means that some people will have bought housing and not reaped returns from it. It’s possible to increase housing values by improving…
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Background: It turns out that groups of people can have shockingly long memories when it comes to historical grievances. Thanks to the power of literacy, people might retain the memory of a “score to settle” for something that happened 50, 100, or even 1000 years ago! The Issue: You (or someone you know) might have…
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Background: One popular genre of clickbait article / clickbait video is the shocking reveal that some normal everyday thing is “wrong” in some way (Fig. 1). Popular topics include “the normal U.S. electrical power outlets are actually upside-down!” and “you’re peeling a banana from the wrong end!” (https://www.google.com/search?q=peel+banana+wrong+end). Proposal: Despite this “you’re doing it wrong”…
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Abstract: The 2006 movie Idiocracy depicts an extremely stupid consumerist-focused future. One of the scenes shows a character watching a TV show on a television surrounded by an unbelievably large number of intrusive ads (Figure 1). But is this an unbelievable fraction of screen real-estate to dedicate to ads? Let’s find out! Materials & Methods:…
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Background: Some modern countries are “missing” areas of territory that belonged to the ancestral inhabitants of their region. This inspires citizens of that country to look at a map, compare it to an old map, and say “hey, we should invade that area and take it back over—it was ours in 1648, so it should…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 