Culture
-
Background: Making coffee can involve a number of steps (Figure 1). In an effort to streamline this process, many alternative coffee-making approaches have been devised. Among the “simpler” approaches to making coffee include instant coffee (“just add water”) and the often-ridiculed (yet commercially successful) coffee “pod” system (Figure 2). The coffee pod machine (Figure 3)…
-
Background: A car owner may sometimes be ticketed for parking in a location that was valid, but became invalid due to a highly specific restriction (e.g. “street sweeping every 2nd Tuesday, 8–9 AM”). These “rare” restrictions can be hard to remember or notice. Proposal: Thanks to modern omnipresent surveillance infrastructure, a person’s cell phone can now…
-
Background: When you’re the admiral of an 18th-century navy and you want to communicate with the many other boats in your fleet, what are you going to do? Obviously you can’t just send text messages to the other captains, since you’re in the middle of the ocean and won’t have any cell reception. The answer…
-
Background: Many programming languages allow extremely long user-defined variable and function names. Frequently, companies will have a specific policy on naming: for example, forbidding abbreviations and requiring descriptive variable names (e.g., “CALCULATE_TOTAL_COMPOUND_INTEREST” would be OK, but “COMPINT” or “CCI” would not). The Issue: Normally, this makes sense: if someone has to read a bunch of…
-
Background: Camouflage is used by both humans and animals to hide. This can be to avoid potential sources of danger (e.g., a tiger), to avoid being attacked by a predator (e.g., a tiger), or to hide the individual so that they can observe something (e.g., a tiger) without disturbing it. The Issue: Although tigers are…
-
The Issue: People occasionally dye their hair a different color. This process is a bit time-consuming, and it’s not always immediately clear what the results will be. Although it’s possible for a person to edit a digital photo to preview a new hair color, this type of simulation lacks the immersive three-dimensional quality that would…
-
Background: Learning a foreign language can be time-consuming, primarily due to the large number of words that need to be memorized. Some attempts have been made to make this process easier by making a “common” second language that everyone could learn (the most well-known of these is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto). This would, in theory, fix the…
-
Background: A “pill organizer” (Figure 1) is a container for vitamins, medications, or anything else that a person wants to remember to take on a recurring basis. The Issue: There are many other recurring tasks that could also benefit from a weekly organizer. For example, according to the lobbyists at Big Vegetable, everyone should eat…
-
Background: Many modern nations lay claim to ancient treasures—some of which are in the hands of other countries! But sometimes it’s difficult to determine the “legitimate” owner of an artifact after hundreds of years. Example: Easter Island—which is owned by Chile—is the home of many famous stone statues (“moai”: 🗿). If a UFO relocated all…
-
The Issue: The book-reading experience has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of years. What if we could “modernize” the experience by bringing the experience of reading articles on the web (Figure 1) to the physical-book form factor? Proposal: The solution is simple: a “normal” book can be enhanced with the normal bonus features of Internet…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 