Culture
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Background: In some languages, there are several variants of words (like “this” or “that”) that give you additional “implicit” information about the world. For example, if a person says “this notebook,” it indicates a notebook that is near them. If they say “that notebook,” it indicates a more distantly-located notebook. Even though a language can…
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Background: Some animals communicate at frequencies outside of the normal range of human hearing. For example, bats are constantly flying around and emitting shrill echolocation “pings,” but humans typically can’t hear them. Proposal: Electronic hearing aids have existed for many years, but they’ve always focused on enhancing hearing in the normal human ranges—no one has…
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Background: In ages past, certain vocations had a high technical barrier to entry. For example, to be published writer, a person would have needed a publishing deal (or to buy their own printing press). Similarly, when computers were extremely expensive, a person would need a $5000 computer and a $500 compiler just to write a…
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Background: In the year 2023, machine learning based chatbots finally became superior to the average human*. One interesting feature of these chatbots is that they provide the ability for the user to regenerate an answer. Here’s how the ChatGPT system handles answer regeneration: Not bad at all! [*] If you don’t believe this, please spend…
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Background: There are a number of YouTube exercise-routine channels where the presenter demonstrates some sort of activity, and you, the viewer, are encouraged to contort your body into the same position. The Issue: Humans are quite bilaterally symmetrical. If a yoga presenter is facing sideways, it’s not always extremely obvious which arm / leg is…
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Background: It’s time-consuming to learn a language. It’s also generally advantageous for a language to have as many speakers as possible, since more speakers means more chance of being able to use a language in a given situation. (In the extreme case, a “secret” language that only one person knew would have very minimal utility.)…
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Background: In some languages with non-phonetic elements (e.g. Japanese kanji), there can be additional phonetic annotations above the symbols (Figure 1) to clarify the pronunciation of a non-obvious word. This is particularly useful for students, and for clarifying the pronunciation of rare words. Proposal: Strangely, the English language does not frequently employ this style of…
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Background: Waking up to the horrible “RRRRRINGGGG” or “BEEP BEEP BEEP” sound of an alarm was once an unavoidable feature of the alarm clock. The Issue: Nowadays, most people use their phones as alarm clocks, and the various “alarm” ringtones have become substantially more pleasant, but the problem remains—even a once-pleasant sound becomes annoying and…
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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: Cars have a lot of instruments. These typically indicate the car’s speed, the current gear, and various other qualities of debatable utility. Nowadays, cars have all sorts of additional sensors (potentially including LIDAR, cameras, GPS, etc…), but the dashboard instrument panel has not changed substantially since about 1950. Proposal: Let’s add a new indicator…
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