Culture
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Background: In the pre-smartphone era, it was possible for a person to not know what time it was. This time-inquiring individual could have have asked someone else what time it was and then received the reply “it’s a hair past a freckle!“ (as the responder pretended to check a nonexistent watch on their wrist). (Details:…
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Background: In addition to the currently-8 “full-status” planets, there are approximately 9 more ”B-tier“ planets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet), two of which were even considered “planets” in previous decades: The Issue: In order to get funding, astronomers benefit from the public being interested in their discoveries. Thus, the field of astronomy made a financially-catastrophic mistake in 2006 when…
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Background: In ages past, it was difficult to know much about a historical “hero” besides a one-sentence summary, such as “was the Emperor of Rome” or “invented the steam engine.” Now, it’s easy to find extensive information on most historical individuals, which frequently uncovers 1) crimes against humanity (“killed a bunch of villagers while invading…
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Background: The part of speech known as the “verb”: not strictly necessary! A language without the verb: still technically functional! English vocabulary: already quite large (perhaps excessively large). And obviously fewer words: easier language. Proposal: So for the sake of both children and foreign language students of English, an obvious plan: verbless English! Some examples:…
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Background: When talking to a digital assistant (e.g. Siri, Alexa, Google Home, probably dozens of others), the user can generally speak in a normal human language. For example: “Alexa, play ‘Cool Music for Cool People’.” The Issue: Unfortunately, thee ability to use natural language to communicate with these digital assistants is currently somewhat misleading: they…
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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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The Issue: When multiple people try to view different screens in a dark room, it can be quite annoying. For example, a person trying to watch an atmospheric dark movie might be annoyed by a person playing on their cell phone, yet the cell phone user might also be constantly blinded by flashes of light…
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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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Background: English has a few options for conveying the tone of speech in a sentence by using different letters (Figure 1): italics or bold emphasize a word, capital letters EXPRESS ENTHUSIASM OR ANGER, and a tiny font indicates that, I don’t know, maybe a mouse is speaking. But that’s about it! There is no specific…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 