Culture
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The Issue: Climbing the world’s tallest mountain peaks can be hazardous for several reasons: a person could be blown off the mountain by gale-force winds, get frozen, or die due to insufficient oxygen in the low-atmospheric-pressure “death zone”—and this is before even considering the danger from disease, avalanches, other humans, and high-altitude cryptids such as…
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Background: Animals have varying caloric requirements: usually, larger/warmer ones need to eat more. The Issue: When a small animal eats a small portion of food, it’s hard to intuitively understand how much food that is at a human scale. For example, if a sparrow eats a single sesame seed, is that equivalent to a human…
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Background: Two obvious qualities that contribute to making an alphabet “good”: It’s quick to write. The letters can be distinguished unambiguously. (Information density might also be worth considering—we don’t want the letters to take up too much space—but we’ll be ignoring it here.) Sometimes, speed-of-writing and ease-of-reading is a tradeoff: consider the shorthand shown in…
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Background: Skylights (or light pipes) are a great way to get natural sunlight indoors. Unfortunately, installation is moderately complicated and is infeasible for renters and high-rise dwellers. Also, skylights only provide light during the daytime (unsurprisingly). Proposal: Thanks to LED lighting, it is possible to create a convincing “artificial skylight” (Figure 1) for 50 American…
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Background: In video games, the player generally has only a few options for interacting with the environment: often just “shoot a gun”—and maybe nothing else (Figure 1)! In particular, most games lack a button for, say, “raise eyebrow” or “shrug noncommittally.” Proposal: Despite the prevalence of “shoot a gun” as a video game option, this…
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The Issue: Vacuuming a house can be an annoying chore. Robots exist (famously, the Roomba) that will vacuum a floor, but they have many limitations and can’t handle certain common locations, like carpeted stairs. Proposal: What is needed is a vacuum cleaner that can go anywhere that gets foot traffic. And what better way to…
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The Issue: It’s frequently the case that a person has an insufficient number of hands to perform a particular task. Specifically, a person carrying two objects (Figure 1) might temporarily need an extra hand to operate a door handle / press a button / etc. As shown above, solutions to this problem are inelegant at…
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The Issue: When eating, sometimes the most appealing thing to do is to immediately wolf down all the food in front of you. People then occasionally regret this overeating, and wish there were some way to more easily exercise self control despite the presence of delicious food. Proposal: We can solve this wolfing-down of food…
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The issue: Frequently, people buy exercise equipment but then don’t actually use it. Instead, barbells gather dust and exercise bikes are used as a supplementary clothing racks. Proposal: One effective way of encouraging a person to use their exercise equipment is to have the equipment physically block access to the owner’s bed (Figure 1). This…
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Background: In some video games, there is a difficulty setting referred to as “ironman,” in which a player only has one life—if they die, they must replay the ENTIRE game over again. (This is also the default setting in the “roguelike” game genre.) Proposal: In books, unfortunately there is no equivalent to this “ironman” mode—until…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 