Culture
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Background: If you go into a coffeeshop in a major city, there is a good chance that you will find it entirely colonized by patrons with laptops who use the shop as a “home office.” Even if you wait for half an hour, you might never get a table. Woe! Previously, this issue could be…
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Background: Modern cities face a number of issues due to old buildings. For example: Housing that isn’t up to code Abandoned buildings Absentee owners who don’t maintain their property Urban decay Proposal: Fortunately, with an amazing new idea, we can revitalize urban development and create guaranteed construction jobs. Specifically, the proposal is as follows: Build…
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The issue: When you call for transportation in a crowded area (Fig. 1), it’s often unclear both: 1) For you, the pedestrian, which of the numerous indistinguishable late model imported silver cars is picking you up 2) For the driver, which of the many pedestrians is actually the one who summoned that specific car. Fig…
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The issue: Sometimes you want to leave a very short note, but you don’t have a pen handy. Normally, you’d be out of luck, but with this amazing trick, you can leave a note with a page from any magazine or piece of paper you happen to have lying around! Proposal: First, learn morse code…
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Background: Misunderstandings of meaning are often encountered due to ambiguities in human language. This causes problems in several ways, particularly in: Translation between languages Interpretation of laws 1) In regards to translation: For any non-trivial translation between two languages, a human is still required in order to figure out the meaning of it and a…
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Background: Everyone has at some point had their personal space intruded upon by a discourteous and/or humongous individual on a bus, train, plane, or movie theater. If only there were some way to reclaim your personal space! Proposal: But there is! The answer is an inflatable pufferfish-inspired jacket (Figure 1). Fig 1: In normal situations,…
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Background: It’s often hard to assess the total cost of renting vs buying. For example: Renting a house (plus renters’ insurance) versus owning a house (plus homeowner’s insurance, property tax, and maintenance, and possibly offset by property value appreciation) Owning a timeshare versus renting a vacation house once a year Taking a taxi / using…
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Background: In olden times, recordings could only be viewed at home by either personal movie projector (extremely rare) or VHS player. Nowadays, digital video makes it possible for anyone to get on-demand video without the hassle of low-quality video and rewinding tapes. But perhaps the “VHS experience” is integral to getting the full effect from…
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Background: With the introduction of DVDs, it first became possible for a movie to contain user-selectable arrangements of scenes. This was a rarely used feature, but it did have a few interesting applications, such as a feature on the Memento DVD that allowed the movie to be watched in reverse order from normal (i.e., in…
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Background: An emoji overview: Fig 1: Current Apple emoji skin tones. Available tones vary by emoji font designer (e.g., Google, Microsoft). Emoji people were originally only available with a light skin tone. Recently, more skin tone options have been added (Fig 1). However, they are just a recoloring of the original emoji, and thus may not have realistic…
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