Culture
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Background: Certain types of apartment / home arrangements are rare in the United States (e.g. courtyard apartments or a second “back” unit behind a front house). Such residences are often not directly visible from the road, and accessing them may require going through a gate. They may also have addresses that include fractions or letters,…
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Background: Certain sequences of Unicode characters are displayed as flags. Although most flag emoji are national flags, there are also a few other types, like the European Union flag (🇪🇺), U.S. territory flags (e.g. Puerto Rico: 🇵🇷), and a pirate flag (🏴☠️). The Issue: Although U.S. territories have emoji, states do not! This is a bit of a surprise,…
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Background: Many types of candy come in pre-wrapped miniature single-serving (or “fun sized”) pieces, especially as Halloween candy. The Issue: For many people, it can be difficult to avoid eating an entire bag / bowl / other-type-of-container of candy. Proposal: We can create a candy dispenser that works as follows: first, the user fills the…
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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…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 