Culture
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Background: Essentially all major programming languages exclusively use keywords written in English. (For a couple of exceptions, see the addendum at the end.) But this doesn’t have to be the case! Proposal: By using symbols instead of words, we can convey a concept both more concisely and more easily across languages. See below for a…
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Background: Columns of text in a book or newspaper are generally formatted in the fully justified style (Figure 1), where the text always lines up exactly on both the left and right edges. Fig. 1: The “justify text” button (circled in red) can be found in nearly every text editor. The issue: Justified text works…
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Background: Early 3D games used a relatively small number of polygons to create a blocky “low-poly” approximation of a game environment. Three styles that occasionally come close to the low-poly look are: Mid-Century Modern Scandinavian design (e.g. IKEA) Brutalism But none of these styles are specifically aiming to minimize the number of visible surfaces in…
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Background: The humble door-locking deadbolt has suffered from a severe failure of innovation and imagination in the last 100 years. Specifically: most deadbolts have exactly two positions (Figure 1): Open (door can be opened from either side) Closed (door requires a key to open from the outside or a switch to be operated from the…
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Background: Exercise routines are often extremely dry and boring. But they can be made more engaging by making a “themed” workout, with each part of a workout helping to accomplish an imaginary goal. This is not a totally new idea. For example, the game “Zombies Run” motivates a person to jog faster by providing a…
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Background: The stop sign, for all its utilitarian simplicity, has a severe and critical shortcoming: it has two different roles, both marked by the same sign (Figure 1). The two situations, and what the driver must do in each case: All-way stop: driver can casually check for other cars right there at the intersection, and…
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The issue: Many computers are unable to handle letters that don’t fall into the set of Latin characters used by English. Even though the Unicode standard has greatly improved multi-character-set accessibility, problems still arise: A character might not exist in a chosen font. For example, “Egyptian Hieroglyph of a bird catching a fish” is probably…
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The issue: If you’re wearing headphones, it can be difficult to hear when someone is trying to get your attention. (Similarly, it can be heard to get the attention of someone wearing headphones without startling them.) Proposal: Headphones could have a small microphone on them with a processing unit that could listen for certain words.…
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Background, part 1: Clothing catalogues occasionally provide a summary of the clothes that a model in an advertisement is wearing; usually this will be a piece of text that looks something like “Get this Look: Jeans $100, Shirt $40, Weird Socks $10.” This is a good system: the company can sell you more clothing this…
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Background: When a company offers a rebate (“buy this widget, get $50 back”), only a fraction of customers will actually deposit the rebate check. If customers don’t deposit their rebates, then the company can keep the money. So it would be useful if there was some sort of dirty trick to reduce rebate deposit rates.…
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