Culture
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Background: Generally, the more letters / symbols your alphabet has, the more hassle it is to type on a keyboard. There are ways to mitigate this issue (e.g. Japanese and Chinese manage), but it’s a lot more straightforward if you can just cut down the number of symbols entirely. English, with 26 letters plus a…
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Background: Hundreds of years ago, a cool looking numeric system was invented for writing numbers from 0–9999 in a single cryptic rune: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals. In Figure 1, we see how two such symbols could represent a phone number. Proposal: By making use of these strange-looking numbers, ”boring“ mundane activities—like dialing a phone number—can become more exciting…
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Background: Workplaces will occasionally have “countdown clocks,” like “X days without a workplace injury” or “Y days until our product is launched.” The Issue: Sometimes, it’s hard for companies (and employees) to take a long-term view of things—everyone is just focused on the next financial quarter’s profits, or short-term stock value. Proposal: In order to…
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Background: It’s difficult to appreciate the amount of energy that is consumed by a citizen of a modern industrial economy. If we only consider household electricity, a “reasonable” amount of consumption (ignoring air conditioning or heating) can be more than 5 kilowatt-hours (~200 watts of average usage over a 24-hour period). A non-bicycling-enthusiast adult can…
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The Issue: One issue that faces business owners is the issue of providing physical security. Businesses that have a lot of cash on the premises may be targeted for robberies, which can be dangerous to both employees and patrons. Ideally, we would have a way to discourage criminals from using deadly weapons in a robbery…
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Background: Clothing comes in a wide variety of sizes, and it’s likely that a person will accumulate garments that fit to various degrees of acceptability. The Issue: Annoyingly, it can be hard to remember which clothing items have which styles of fit. One could imagine the solution of just throwing out everything that wasn’t a…
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Background: When reading the news, people should ideally form opinions of the events in question based on the actual merits being reported. However, a frequent approach is: “Is this something that my nation or my political party did? Then I’m sure it’s good.” The Issue: Although this is undeniably often a successful heuristic (e.g. “cannibal…
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Background: Many computer games award “achievements” or “trophies” to the player upon the completion of various challenges: e.g. “Achievement: Finish Level 4 Without Taking Damage” or “Collect Over 1,000,000 Doubloons.” Players will often dedicate substantial effort to these tasks, despite the fact that there is generally no in-game reward for them. Proposal: What if we…
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Background: Some types of pets (notably, cats) are fond of both 1) hiding and 2) napping. The Issue: This can make it difficult for the pet owner to know if their treasured beast is inside the house. Did it come back in the house from the patio? Or is it sleeping in a tree outside?…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 