Culture
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Background: People often don’t pay much attention to movies, preferring to play on their cell phones while the movie runs in the background. (After all, if you miss an important scene, you’ll can always rewind and watch it again.) The issue: This lack of dedication to the cinematic arts is a phenomenon that movie directors…
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Get exercise and improve your self-control with this new eco-friendly hand-crank-powered cell phone!
The issue: It is frequently asserted that people are addicted to cell phones. If only there were a technical solution to this problem! Proposal: Here’s a simple solution to discourage casual cell phone use: a cell phone with two features: A strict limit on the amount of time you can use each program. (This feature…
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Background: Online discussion forums often have posts that look like this: Air pollution actually SAVES 10,000 lives per day worldwide >109 Comments [Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments] Or: Futuristic economic model allows Swedes to make $200,000 a year without having jobs >274 Comments [Upvote] [Downvote] [View Comments] The issue: Crucially, the comment page is usually completely…
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Background: Sometimes, someone will send out a company-wide email that is CCed to everyone else at the company. The issue: Anyone who sends a “reply all” response to that initial email will generate another company-wide email. After a while, people will start getting annoyed by the constant irrelevant emails and will request that people stop…
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Background: Many types of cars—e.g. hatchbacks, SUVs, “crossover” vehicles—do not have a secure trunk space. Although these vehicles often come with retractable covers that can hide the contents of the trunk, they often don’t have 100% coverage. (So if you have a laptop sliding around in the back of your car, it’s entirely possible that…
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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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