Culture
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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…
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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…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 