Culture
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Background: Car sun visors are useful for avoiding glare while driving. But they require constant adjustment on winding roads, and they don’t work at all if the sun is too low in the sky (e.g. sunrise, sunset conditions). Proposal: Instead of having a sun visor, what if the sun was blocked by an “eclipse disc,”…
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Background: Looking out to sea from most coastal locations results in the same view: a featureless horizon of sky and sea. But we can fix that with modern construction techniques! Proposal: Let’s improve those boring ocean views by adding silhouettes of distant cities and monuments (Figure 1). This way, when you look out into the…
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Stop living in barbaric savagery with the English words “left” and “right.” Ascend to the next level of consciousness and realize your new potential with this new secret wisdom only for the most enlightened individuals.
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The issue: People often confuse the directions “left” and “right.” Additionally, “right” can additionally mean “correct,” which leads to the exchange: “Should I turn left here?” “Right.” This is stupid and must be fixed if English is going to remain competitive with the world’s top languages, like Esperanto (Figure 1) and Loglan. Proposal: Instead…
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Background: There’s a huge market for telling people what they want to hear, whether or not it’s true. Additionally, there is a $10,000,000,000+ annual market in self-improvement books in the United States alone. It would be profitable to get even a small slice of this enormous market! The Issue: Writing and promoting a self-help book…
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Background: Voice recognition has existed in somewhat passable form since the late 1990s. But recently it has become more prominent with Apple Siri, the “OK Google” voice assistant, and Amazon Alexa. The issue: However, these products are all incredibly limited, and can perform almost no actions beyond a few hard-coded ones that were added at…
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Background: Sometimes, when driving through a residential neighborhood road, you may encounter annoying speed bumps, speed humps, or speed lumps (Figure 1). The issue: These speed bumps / lumps discourage you from taking the shortcut (Figure 2). But you’re important, and have places to be! If only there were some way you could take these…
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Background: Baseball is one of the few [1] sports where the playing field is not standardized: The outfield can vary substantially in size and shape from ballpark to ballpark. The presence / absence of fences can change the possibility of an out-of-the-park home run. This adds up to the strange situation where a home run…
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Background: When packing a box for shipping, some objects can stack perfectly with no wasted space. However, some common shapes—for example, cylinders (e.g. toilet paper rolls) and spheres (e.g. oranges)—can’t be packed without wasted empty space in the box (Figure 1). Proposal: If someone orders a set of products that don’t pack together,…
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Background: Certain types of vending machines are capable of squeezing oranges and dispensing the freshly-squeezed orange juice right there at the machine. Generally speaking, these machines actually show you the oranges through a transparent window, so you can see the orange-juice-making process. Most of these machines proclaim that you are getting “100% Orange Juice” or…
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Background: Running a business is expensive, and employee wages are usually a huge fraction of total costs (see Figure 1). However, these jobs can’t always be eliminated: many jobs still REQUIRE a human employee, and jobs that require an on-site presence can’t be outsourced. Proposal: Some jobs require an on-site presence and are difficult to…
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