Culture
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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, itâs not always extremely obvious which arm / leg is…
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Background: Itâs time-consuming to learn a language. Itâs 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 âsecretâ 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 âRRRRRINGGGGâ or âBEEP BEEP BEEPâ 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 âalarmâ ringtones have become substantially more pleasant, but the problem remainsâeven 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 â232 pages (67%) remaining.â 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 carâs 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: Letâs add a new indicator…
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Background: In the early 2020s, the appeal of short (< 1 minute) videos became widespread, with TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and other services vying for market share. (Surprisingly, the earliest major entrant into this genre, Vine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)), completely failed and was shut down in 2017). The Issue: Unfortunately, the popularity of âbite-sizedâ videos has…
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Background: People who do not live in a jungle frequently associate the âsounds of the jungleâ (e.g. the noises of birds and other miscellaneous creatures) with a sort of exotic and faraway mystique. Proposal: This idea is already used in theme parks, but thereâs no reason we canât apply it everywhere: any business that has…
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Background: According to the American Dental Association, the âgeneralâ recommendation is for people to brush their teeth for two-ish minutes, twice a day. The Issue: Two minutes is a long time! Maybe thereâs some way to motivate people to brush their teeth for this long. Proposal: The incentive is simple: two-minute videos that are only…
