Technology
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Background: Remember when privacy was a thing? No? Oh, ok then. But people used to have some concern about having their location and whereabouts monitored by companies and governments. I guess this information was used for evil-doing at least once in history? Whatever, who cares, let’s gather data and make an app! The issue: Have…
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Background: A “three-way light switch” (i.e. two switches that control the same light) is useful when there are multiple places that need to control a single light, such as at both the top and the bottom of a staircase. The issue: Unfortunately, three-way switches are often out of sync with the actual state of the…
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The issue: Both humans and automated vacuum cleaners (e.g. Roombas) find it inconvenient to operate a vacuum cleaner around furniture—specifically, no one wants to move extremely heavy furniture just to vacuum around the legs. Proposal: Most furniture is still stable even when not all supporting legs are contacting the ground. So why not have telescoping…
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Background: In the past, you could tell what a computer was doing (to some extent) just by listening to it. Disk access would be accompanied by a classic floppy disk sound (or the “click” of a hard drive) The fan would spin up if the CPU was under high load. You could actually listen to network…
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Background: Sometimes, if you are groggily taking a shower in the morning without paying much attention, you may forget whether or not you’ve already washed your hair (Figure 1). The issue: You can, of course, always wash your hair again, but then you wasted both time AND shampoo. What if the bottle itself could…
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Background: When people go on vacation, 99% of their pictures are of sunsets and monuments that have been photographed thousands of times before. Sure, that image of a majestic tropical bird perched in front of a waterfall may seem like one-in-a-million shot, but that still means that one hundred variants of it have already been…
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Background: Refrigeration is a great way to preserve foods. But chilling and/or freezing foods can have adverse effects on taste. What if there was a way to stop time for the food WITHOUT chilling it? Proposal: Luckily, physics provides a solution: as an object moves more quickly through space, it experiences the effects of time…
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Background: A lot of kitchen tools have a non-electric version that is hand-cranked: for example, a coffee grinder, ice-cream maker, mixer, or salad-spinner. Additional common hand-powered items include the can opener and pepper mill. The issue: Unfortunately, many of these tools are slow and inefficient to operate by hand. However, if there were some way…
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Background: Slide presentations are now a main ingredient in almost all lectures and presentations (Figure 1). The issue: Computers have made slide presentations extremely easy to make (example in Figure 2), but haven’t helped with one issue: presentations often go on FAR TOO LONG. For example, none of these ideas for promoting short presentations…
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The issue: Imagine this situation: You are a high-ranking member of the royal family. One day, you drive your expensive sports car to your downtown office, park it in the garage, and head to the elevator. You get in, and press the “6” button, to take the elevator to your sixth-floor office. But as soon…
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