Technology
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Background: When baking a pizza in an oven, it’s it’s easy to remove the pizza from the oven and instantly start devouring it. The issue: Unfortunately, molten cheese (Fig. 1) cannot coexist with human tissue, so this causes severe burns to the impatient pizza-eater. Proposal: We can prevent further occurrences of this culinary tragedy by…
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Background: When giving a presentation to a diverse audience (e.g. of experts and non-experts, or of employees from two different departments in a company), you have a problem: you can only make one set of slides, but sometimes you might want to tailor different parts of the presentation to a different audience. For example, one…
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Background: Moderating the comments section of any web site is a thankless and un-ending task. But what if there were some way to make it slightly easier? Proposal: Instead of just allowing any comments, we can require that comments be totally unique and never-before-seen. Once a comment is made, or an image is posted, a…
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Background: Print news has unfortunately been dealt a mortal blow by a combination of the Internet and mobile phones. But there’s still one way to take advantage of the physical nature of printed news—a way that cannot be replicated by news on a phone! Proposal: We can bring printed newspapers and promote a healthy lifestyle…
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Background: In the United States, an employed person has two conflicting goals: To commute to their job as fast as possible (ideally by “hyperloop” or helicopter), …and to live as far away from their workplace as possible. To these ends, thousands of man-hours have gone into new legislation preventing residences near places of employment (zoning…
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Background: Part 1: As Internet speeds have increased, web sites have become more and more enormous (Example: Figure 1). Part 2: Additionally, people have become more and more accustomed to impulsively wasting time on the Internet. The issue: Here are the two problems that we can solve simultaneously: Enormous web pages are slow to…
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Background: People are often glued to their cell phones at all times, thanks primarily to the ease of finding an amusing distraction on the Internet. The issue: There have been various proposals to mitigate the scourge of “phone addiction,” for example, setting your phone screen to black-and-white / grayscale in order to reduce its appeal…
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Background: Currently, there is no easy way to have the experience of becoming a tiny ant [*]. This is a shortcoming that could not be addressed—until now, thanks to modern VR technology! [*] You could watch the 1989 film Honey I Shrunk the Kids, but that isn’t an interactive experience. Proposal: Thanks to virtual reality,…
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Background: When printing non-color text on paper, you generally want to print the text as dark as possible, for maximum contrast. Proposal: With this new “two-sided mirror printing” idea, text can be printed darker than is normally possible, with this one trick: the printer automatically prints a mirror image of your text on the opposite…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 