Culture
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Background: A “snail” is a slug-like creature with a shell on its back. Many snails can entirely retreat into their shells for protection, which lead people to describe the snail as “wearing its house on its back.” (This is not strictly accurate, since snails do not pay property tax.) The Issue: High cost of living…
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Background: Certain types of office jobs, such as data entry, are limited by the typing speed of the operator. This is generally acceptable for humans, because human hands are adequate for keyboard typing. The smallest common keyboard has 61 keys (a so-called “60%” keyboard: https://www.google.com/search?q=60%25+keyboard). So the maximum possible human key coverage (Figure 1) is…
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Background: People occasionally keep a diary or journal as in order to record the events of their life and, ideally, reflect on them in a positive manner. The Issue: Unfortunately, the process of keeping a diary requires discipline and dedication. It can be easy for someone to get out of the routine of keeping a…
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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)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 