10,000 Brilliant Ideas

An idea stemmed from my conversation with a friend last night. For teens who's eyes have just been opened to the world, how about an on-line group where each logger-on fills out a profile for where they're from, and nationality, etc. and are then matched into a group with exactly one person from each country/region. The group defines a strong community and each member feels important since they are the only one of their kind in the group. Perhaps this could overcome the insulated effect that teens get into where the rest of the world is just too far away.

Why doesn't this exist? If it does, where is it? I want a tool not unlike gapminder that takes summary statistics from tons of studies and allows me to mash them together. Traditionally, this has been done with meta-analyses which are studies of studies that compare these outcomes and using different weights and probably other things (you want me to read wikipedia on this?) to come up with some sort of broad conclusion based on all the evidence. Granted, this may not be as scientifically sound, but hey, everyone's doing homemade ecological studies (these are the gapminder kind) and I don't see anyone cryin'. Here's the experience (for anyone I haven't lost) I have a kid who hates to wear his seatbelt (hypothetical here of course). I think what are the actual risks if you don't wear a seatbelt . So I look up the Meta-analysis explorer under seat-belts for kids and I narrow it down to around his age range and I get some statistic like, A kid in the US who does...

Dear reader, I address you as reader, because I am making the brash assumption that there is one of you. I realize this may be an overestimation. Unless I include myself. You may think this blog is getting rusty and dusty. That I've forgotten all about it. This is entirely sort of not true. The truth is I've been throwing in posts now and again, but I only save them as drafts meaning to polish them up later. Yeah, hm. So now, I'm posting willy nilly. You're getting it raw and uncut. If I do come back and edit, it will be on the live post. So if you're hoping one of these will never change, tough beans. Copy it to your hard-drive, you. Get off my back! You don't know what it's like to be me!!!!! Sorry, but that is the rawness I'm talking about. From now on, you're getting draft posts whenever I think of em. I may give it a read over before posting, but maybe not. I'm a productionist afterall not a perfektionist. Be warned, I may be straining the d...

All I want is a big scarf with a big pocket in each end. In one pocket is a pair of matching gloves and in the other a matching hat. That's all.

There are people who are late, and then there are people who are really late. Most of us have had a run with showing up 5 minutes late for a series of events - there's just too much to do in the time allotted. But then there are people who are really late - like hours late. I won't pretend to understand the science behind this, but I'll give these people a cop-out and say they are just running on polychronic time. I may be misunderstanding this, but for my purposes, I'll say it's looking at time like when you were a kid. You didn't know when the school bus came. You just waited until you mom said "your bus is here" and then you went outside. 7:52 meant nothing to you. I've occasionally relapsed into this mode as well, but I think the hour-laters are in it much more often. Enter the polychronic watch. It works thusly. You enter an appointment in your watch and it asks you a series of questions: what time the appointment is, how much time do you nee...

I know this must have been dreamed up before. How can you ride a train and not think of ways of doing it better?. But why doesn't it exist yet? Specifically, why doesn't it exist on my commute? I could sleep in an extra 10 minutes! Basically these are stopless trains. They are made up of several short cars with automatic doors on each end that couple together automatically. There is one of these coupled units at each stop. You come to the stop hop on the short car in front of you and when the train nears the stop, the car takes off on it's own in front of the train. The train catches up to it and couples on and the doors in the back open up. You then walk back through the train to the car of the stop you're getting off on (as seen by the digital notice boards) and sit down. The train drives full speed until your stop when the doors in front close and your segment detaches and slows down to the stop. You hop off enjoying the fastest land commute known to man. Not to ment...

This café is wired. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. What goes on inside is constantly broadcast in real-time on the café's website. There is a bold disclaimer on the front door telling everyone who enters that their conversation and image will be viewable by anyone accessing the site. It is open from 6am to 2am the next morning to maximize global viewing time, without becoming too seedy. It is located in New York or LA or maybe both. Another option: At the same time, monitors in the cafe show analytics in real time of how many people are on the website and where they are located. Maybe it even shows how many people are watching each camera and listening to each microphone. Perhaps people on-line could post chats and be active participants as well. Would no one want to go to a café where their privacy is completely nil? Would no one want to sit at their computer and watch people living instead of doing it themselves? Or do people have an inner desire to be seen, especi...