Culture
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Background: Security cameras have become extremely cheap, and it’s economically quite feasible for a homeowner to have a really excessive-seeming number covering the entire exterior of their home or apartment. The Issue: As more cameras are added, more tiny security camera windows are shown. It can become overwhelming to even try to make sense of…
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Background: One of the various promises of “augmented reality” (or “AR”) is the ability for a user to wear a virtual reality headset that edits reality in some vaguely useful fashion. For example, a maintenance worker might be able to overlay a diagram of the wiring inside walls, giving them a sort of “x-ray vision.”…
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Background: In the mid-2010s and 2020s, the service “Twitter” was a popular method for celebrities to share short messages with their followers. It had the unusual property of requiring short posts (originally only 140 characters). This was originally due to ancient historical limitations on sending messages (called “SMS”es) over phones, but a slightly-increased limit was…
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Background: Every year, tens of millions of coloring books are sold to children and adults alike. The Issue: Filling in a coloring book can be quite a time-consuming process. Even with frantic scribbling and thick markers, it’s a slow process to fully color even a single page in a coloring book (Figure 1). Proposal: Thanks…
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Background: Supposedly, changing a phone’s display to only show a drab grayscale tends to reduce the amount of time that the phone’s owner spends fiddling around on the Internet. Proposal: Here’s a simple software-only hack that would make people more aware of the amount of time they’re spending on their phones, and might give them…
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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: In most aspects of life, positive and negative elements balance out: if a person has an income of $1000, and expenses of $750, then they have a net income of ($100 – $750 = $250). The Issue: The only area where this does not seem to apply is in the commission of good / evil deeds. …
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Background: There are all manner of weird back-scratching products, like bamboo claws, mini rakes, and probably like, dinosaur teeth or something like that. But all of them require specific effort to use, are generally unwieldy, and are socially frowned upon in a workplace environment. Proposal: The solution is so simple: just integrate the functionality of…
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The Issue: At many companies, large group meetings are a regular occurrence. However, sometimes meetings are unproductive. For example, it might be a situation where only a couple of people run the meeting (and everyone else spaces out), or the meeting participants might includes archetypes such as “jerk who interrupts people” or “yes-man who agrees…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 