Culture
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Background: Old 8-bit video games typically do not adhere to modern standards of occupational safety or handicapped-accessibility. The issue: The issue we will deal with here is making an old game, in this case, Zelda II for the Nintendo Entertainment System, properly compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Obviously this will be simplified,…
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Background: After washing bedsheets, it is difficult to immediately determine the proper orientation for a non-patterned fitted sheet (the bottommost sheet, with the elastic border, the one that looks like this). Frequently, one turns the sheet 90°, only to discover that the sheet was actually correct the first way. Shameful! Now that we have solved…
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The issue: The fine arts constantly struggle for funding, perhaps due to their general inability to compete with modern sources of entertainment. Proposal: In art museums, commercial sponsorship could take the form of (non-destructive) modification to the works of art themselves. For example, the Mona Lisa could be holding an iPhone (an idea which has…
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Background: As previously discussed, losing weight can be hard, especially when when hunting-and-gathering is reduced to “open fridge, acquire food.” If it were less easy to acquire food, perhaps it would be easier to avoid becoming overweight. Proposal: In this new design for a suburban house, the kitchen is physically separated from the rest of…
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6 Baffling Apartment Arrangements You Won’t Believe Are Real* (* they are not real)
architecture, hey there’s no space for a dining table, man who designed those layouts anyway, movable walls, reconfigure your apartment, some crazy apartment layouts or something, those bedrooms in the floorplan don’t look like they would actually fit a bed, those bedrooms would totally fit like a crib or twin bed, what is a “den” anyway isn’t that just a living room, whoa what is up with these layouts
The issue: Many modern apartments are extremely well-built structurally (or perhaps even over-built), but have terrible interior layouts. Unfortunately, it is extremely expensive to reconfigure a floorplan, even if no load-bearing walls (or walls concealing wires or plumbing) need to be modified. For maximum cost-efficiency, a person interested in remodeling could potentially just take a…
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The horrifying issue: The “apostrophe + s” ending in English has multiple meanings. This can be confusing. Fig 1: Hypothesis: the apostrophe (as seen above) is a poor choice of symbol for indicating possession. Here are some examples of a few applications of ’s (or s’ ) : Singular possession (“The cat’s tail.”) Plural possession…
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The issue: The original shape of a film camera was dictated by the physical constraints of film and lenses. However, digital cameras have maintained the same unwieldy and awkward layout of film cameras, even though there is no longer a reason for a camera to be shaped in such a way. In fact, the asymmetrical…
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Background: In this plan, we will discuss a sub-category of indoor climbing: bouldering. Bouldering involves climbing up a surface that is studded with various hand- and foot-holds, and it generally involves no safety equipment beyond a padded mat. The Issue: Bouldering / rock climbing has gained significant mainstream popularity since 2010. However, one thing that…
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Background: Many citizens in countries with jury duty find it to be a somewhat burdensome obligation. Jurors are either unpaid, or paid only a nominal amount (on the order of a couple hours of minimum wage for an 8-hour day). (Note that the jury system is by no means a requirement for a trial. In…
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The issue: The classic yellow-and-white “danger!” tape is visually apparent and can be quite useful for indicating that an area is hazardous or off-limits. However! There are two problems: Fig 1: The classic “danger” tape. But you might not know it if you couldn’t read English! First, the “danger” text is specific to one language.…
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